with a polite compliance
which means nothing. Time after time the Sublime Porte has most solemnly
promised to grant religious liberty to its Christian subjects; but the
promises were but empty air, and those who made them knew it. In fact,
the firmans of reform now and again issued with so much ostentation have
never been looked on by good Moslems as binding, because the chief
spiritual functionary, the Sheikh-ul-Islam, whose assent is needed to
give validity to laws, has withheld it from those very ordinances. As he
has power to depose the Sultan for a lapse of orthodoxy, the result may
be imagined. The many attempts of the Christian Powers to enforce their
notions of religious toleration on the Porte have in the end merely led
to further displays of Oriental politeness.

[Footnote 86: "Islam continues to be, as it has been for twelve
centuries, the most inflexible adversary to the Western spirit"
_(History of Serbia and the Slav Provinces of Turkey,_ by L. von Ranke,
Eng. edit. p. 296).]

It may be asked: Why have not the Christians of Turkey united in order
to gain civic rights? The answer is that they are profoundly divided in
race and sentiment. In the north-east are the Roumanians, a
Romano-Slavonic race long ago Latinised in speech and habit of mind by
contact with Roman soldiers and settlers on the Lower Danube. South of
that river there dwell the Bulgars, who, strictly speaking, are not
Slavs but Mongolians. After long sojourn on the Volga they took to
themselves the name of that river, lost their Tartar speech, and became
Slav in sentiment and language. This change took place before the ninth
century, when they migrated to the south and conquered the districts
which they now inhabit. Their neighbours on the west, the Servians, are
Slavs in every sense, and look back with pride to the time of the great
Servian Kingdom, carved out by Stephen Dushan, which stretched
southwards to the _AEgean_ and the Gulf of Corinth (about 1350).

To the west of the present Kingdom of Servia dwell other Servians and
Slavs, who have been partitioned and ground down by various conquerors
and have kept fewer traditions than the Servians who won their freedom.
But from this statement we must except the Montenegrins, who in their
mountain fastnesses have ever defied the Turks. To the south of them is
the large but little-known Province of Albania, inhabited by the
descendants of the ancient Illyrians, with admixtures of Greeks in th