y expedient to postpone the day of payment in the hope that
something would turn up in his favour. That anything should turn up
seemed in reason impossible, but Oriental fatalism despises reason; and
in this case Oriental fatalism was right judged by the final event.

The sessions of the London Conference found a vividly contrasting
setting in London. (In Constantinople the meetings would have had an
appropriate stage.) It was a contest of Oriental against semi-Oriental
diplomacy; and staid British officials, who had duties in connection
with the Conference, lived for weeks in an atmosphere of bewilderment,
wondering if they were still in the twentieth century or had wandered
back to the Bagdad of the Middle Ages.

The first effort of the Turkish delegates was to gain time. On any point
that arose they wanted instructions from their government and pressed
for an adjournment. When, after a few days, the Conference assembled
again, the instructions had not arrived, and there was need for another
adjournment. At the next meeting the instructions had arrived; but they
were written so illegibly that they could not be deciphered, and so
there was another adjournment. (This illegible despatches excuse had not
even the merit of being novel--it was used many years before in an
Egyptian negotiation.) To the desperate attempts of the Turks to waste
time the diplomats of the Balkan States replied with but little patience
or suavity. They did not recognise fully that they were present at a
death-bed, and that the patient had some excuse for taking an
unconscionable time in dying. Their patience was not increased by the
knowledge of the fact that the time secured by these evasive excuses was
being used in desperate attempts to sow dissensions among the allies and
to beat up support in some European capital for the forlorn Turkish
Empire.

It was over the question of the cession of Adrianople to Bulgaria that
the chief trouble arose, and the Turkish delegates made a great point of
the fact that at Adrianople was the parent mosque of Islam in Europe and
the burial-place of the first Sultans. This plea for their holy places
aroused some sympathy in Europe. I suggested to Dr. Daneff, the chief
Bulgarian delegate to the Conference, that he should allow me to
publish that Bulgaria would allow the Turks to retain the holy places in
Adrianople as an extra-territorial area under the control of the Moslem
Caliph. Dr. Daneff liked the proposa