made subservient to the purposes of honor, duty, liberty, and humanity, it has the immense and otherwise unattainable advantage of leaving the selfish aims of each power to neutralize and destroy one another, and of acting with resistless force for such objects as will bear the light.

"In the years 1876-80 it was the influence of England in European diplomacy which principally distracted the concert of the powers. In determining the particulars of the treaty of Berlin, she made herself conspicuous by taking the side least favorable to liberty in the East. In that state of

things I for one used my best exertions to set up a European concert. In public estimation it would at least have qualified our activity in the support of Turkey, which had then sufficiently displayed her iniquitous character and policy in Bulgaria, though she has since surpassed herself.

"When the ministry of 1880 came into power, we made it one of our first objects to organize a European concert for the purpose of procuring the fulfilment of two important provisions of the treaty of 1878, referring to Montenegro and to Greece respectively. Fair and smiling were the first results of our endeavors. The forces of suasion had been visibly exhausted and the emblems of force were accordingly displayed, a squadron consisting of ships of war carrying the flags of each of the powers being speedily gathered on the Montenegrin or Albanian coast. But we soon discovered that for several of the powersconcert of Europe' bore a signification totally at variance with that which we attached to it, and that it included toy demonstrations which might be made under a condition that they should not pass into reality.

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We did not waste our time in vain endeavors to galvanize a corpse, but framed a plan for the seizure of an important port of the sultan's dominions. **We found our principal support in wise and brave Alexander II., who then reigned over Russia. Our plan became known to the sultan, and, without our encountering a single serious difficulty, Montenegro obtained the considerable extension which she now enjoys, and Thessaly was added to Greece.

As nothing can be better, nay, nothing so good, as the concert of Europe,' where it can be made to work, so, as the best when in its

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corruption always changes to the worst, nothing can be more mischievous than the pretense to be working with this tool when it is not really in working order. The concert of Europe then comes to mean the concealment of dissents, the lapse into generalities, and the settling down upon negations at junctures when duty loudly calls for positive action. A cabinet can work together because it has a common general purpose, and this purpose has a unifying effect on particular questions as they arise. But the powers of Europe have no such common purpose to bring them together. Lastly, and what is worst of all, this pretended and ineffectual co-operation of governments shuts out the peoples.

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time to speak with freedom.

It is

"At this moment two great states [Russia and Germany], with a European population of one hundred and forty or perhaps one hundred and fifty millions, are under the government of two young men, each bearing the high title of emperor, but in one case wholly without knowledge or experience, in the other having only such knowledge and experience, in truth limited enough, as have excited much astonishment and some consternation when an inkling of them has been given to the world. In one case the government is a pure and perfect despotism, and in the other equivalent to it in matters of foreign policy, so far as it can be understood in a land where freedom is indigenous, familiar, and full grown. their power in the concert to fight steadily against freedom. But why are we to have our govern-ment pinned to their aprons? * * These powers, so far as their sentiments are known, have been using

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"At the heels of this concert we have plodded patiently for two years, and what has it done for us-done for us, not in promoting justice and humanity, for that question has long ago been answered, but in securing peace? I affirm that with all its pretension and its power it has worsened and not bettered the situation. When we pointed to the treaty obligations and treaty rights which solemnly and separately bound us to stop the Armenian massacres, we were threatened, by the credulity of some and the hypocrisy of others, with a European war as a certain consequence of any coercive measure, however disinterested, which we might adopt for checking crimes sufficient to make the stones cry out.

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"Well, intimidation of this kind carried the day, and to the six powers was intrusted the care of the public peace. It was not a very difficult task. There was not a real breath of war in the air two years and one year ago. Now Turkey has a casus belli against Greece. Greece has a casus belli against the powers. Turkey may have one against them, too, were it to her interest to raise it. So far as Turkey and Greece are concerned, this is no mere abstraction, and Europe flutters from day to day with anxiety to know whether there is or is not war on the Thessalian frontier. It is surely time that we should have done, at least for the present occasion, with the gross and palpable delusion, under which alone can

we hope for any effectual dealing by a European concert with the present crisis in the East. It is time to shake off the incubus and to remember, as in days of old, that we have an existence, a character, and a duty of our own.

"But, then, we are told by the German emperor and others that we can only have reforms in Turkey on the condition of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman empire. At one time this phrase had a meaning and was based upon a theory-a theory propounded by men of such high authority as Lord Palmerston and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. It was that Turkey, if only she were sheltered by European power from the hostility of her neighbor, was alike disposed and competent to enter into the circle of the civilized powers. The shelter prayed for was assured by the Crimean war. After the Peace of Paris, in 1856, she enjoyed twenty years of absolute immunity from foreign alarms. In no point or particular save one did she fulfill the anticipation proclaimed on her behalf. She showed herself the match for any European state in wanton expenditure and in rapid accumulation of debt, to which she added the natural sequel in shameless robbery of her creditors. It was at the cost of three hundred thousand lives and three hundred millions of money that the question of Turkey's capacity to take rank among the civilized nations was brought to a conclusive test, negatively, through the total failure of the scheme of internal reform, and, alas! positively, through the horrible outrages which desolated Bulgaria and brought about fresh mutilation of the territory.

"It shows an amazing courage or an amazing infatuation that, after a mass of experience alike deplorable and conclusive, the rent and ragged catchword of integrity of the Ottoman empire' should still be flaunted in our eyes. Has it then a meaning? Yes, and it had a different meaning in almost every decade of the century now expiring. In the first quarter of that century it meant that Turkey, though her system was poisoned and effete, still occupied in right of actual sovereignty the whole southeastern corner of Europe, appointed by the Almighty to be one of its choicest portions. În 1830 it meant that this baleful sovereignty had been abridged by the excision of Greece from Turkish territory. In 1860 it meant that the Danubian principalities now forming the kingdom of Roumania had obtained an emancipation virtually, as it is now formally, complete. In 1878 it meant that Bosnia, with Herzegovina, had bid farewell to all active concern with Turkey; that Servia was enlarged; and that northern Bulgaria was free. In 1880 it meant that Montenegro had crowned its glorious battle of four hundred years by achieving acknowledgment of its independence and obtaining great accession of territory, and that Thessaly was added to free Greece. In 1886 it meant that southern Bulgaria had been permitted to associate itself with its northern sisters.

"What is the upshot of all this? That 18,000,000 of human beings, who, a century ago, peopling a large part of the Turkish empire, were subject to its at once paralyzing and degrading yoke, are now as free from it as if they were inhabitants of these islands; and that Greece, Roumania, Servia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria stand before us as five living witnesses that, even in this world, reign of wrong is not eternal. But still it is dinned in our ears from the presses, and indeed from the thrones of a continent, that we must not allow our regard for justice, humanity, and freedom of life and honor to bring into question or put to hazard the integrity of the Ottoman empire.'

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Of remaining fractions of European Turkey the island of Crete has long been one of the least patient under the yoke. * The hopelessness of the Cretan case is manifested by a long series of rebellions, in which the islanders, though single-handed, engaged themselves against the whole strength of the Ottoman empire in a struggle of life and death for deliverance."

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The revolts of 1831, 1841, 1858, 1866-8, 1877-8, 1889, and finally 1896, are then referred to; and the letter goes on: It is not in human nature, except under circumstances of grinding and destructive oppression, to renew a struggle so unequal. This simple aggregate of the facts, presented in outline, once for all convicts the central power and shows that it has no title to retain its sanguinary and ineffectual dominion. It is needless to go further. We are really dealing with a res judicata, for, though not of their own free will, the six powers have taken into their own hands the pacification of the island and the determination of its future. But we must not suppose that we owe this intervention to a recrudescence of spirit and courage in counsels that had hitherto resulted in a concert of miserable poltroonery.

"A new actor, governed by a new temper, has appeared upon the stage; not one equipped with powerful fleets, large armies, and boundless treasuries, supplied by uncounted millions, but a petty power, hardly counted in the list of European states, suddenly takes its place midway in the conflict between Turkey and its Cretan insurgents. But it is a power representing the race that had fought the battles of Thermoply and Salamis and had hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores. In the heroic age of Greece, as Homer tells us, there was a champion who was small of stature but full of fight. He had in his little body a great soul, and he seems to have been reproduced in the recent and marvellously gallant action of Greece. It is sad to reflect that we have also before us the reverse of the picture in the six powers, who offer to the world the most conspicuous example of the reverse, and present to us a huge body animated, or rather tenanted, by a feeble heart. We have then before us, it is literally true, a David facing six Goliaths.

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"Nor is Greece so easily disposed of as might have been anticipated; and what the world seems to understand is this: that there is life in the Cretan matter, that this life has been infused into it exclusively by Grecian action, and that if, under the merciful providence of God and by paths which it is hard as yet to trace, the island is to find her liberation, that inestimable boon will be owing, not to any of the great governments of Europe, for they are paralyzed by dissension, nor even to any of the great peoples of Europe, for the door is shut in their faces by the concert of Europe,' but to the small and physically insignificant race known as the Greeks. Whatever good shall be permitted to emerge from the existing chaos will lie to their credit and to theirs alone.

"Is it to be wondered at that Greece should have endeavored to give aid to the Cretans? As often as they rise in rebellion and their efforts, due to Turkish blindness and bad faith, are encountered by lawless cruelty, they fly in crowds to Greece, which is their only refuge; and that poor country has to stand, and stand alone, between them and starvation. As to their Turkish masters, it is not to be expected that they should find any cause for uneasiness in such a state of things, for, ever since that evil day, the darkest perhaps in the whole known history of humanity, when their star, reeking with gore, rose above the horizon, has it not been their policy and constant aim

to depopulate the regions which they ruled? The title of Turkey de jure is, in truth, given up on all hands. In the meagre catalogue of things which the six united powers have done, there is this, at least, included, that they have taken out of the hands of the sultan the care and administration of the island.

"If Turkey has the proper rights of a governing power, every act they have done and are doing and their presence in Canea itself is a gross breach of international law. It is the violence, cruelty, and perfidy of Ottoman rule which alone give them any title to interfere. The intention which has been announced on their behalf, an announcement incredible but true, is that when the Greek forces should have left the island the Turkish soldiery, the proved butchers of Armenia, the same body and very probably the same corps and persons were to remain as guardians of order in the island. But the six powers have no more right than I have either to confer or to limit this commission unless the sultan by his misconduct has forfeited his right to rule. Autonomy, too, being announced for Crete, and not by his authority but by theirs, Crete being thus derelict in point of lawful sovereignty, does all reversionary care for it fall to the six powers? Are we really to commence our twentieth century under the shadow of a belief that conventions set up by the policy of the moment are everything, and that community of blood, religion, history, sympathy, and interest are nothing?

"How stands the case of Crete in relation to Greece? Do what you will by the might of brute power, ‘a man's a man for a' that;' and in respect of everything that makes a man to be a man, every Cretan is a Greek. Ottoman rule in Crete is a thing of yesterday; but Crete was part of Greece, the Cretan people of the Greek people, at least three thousand years ago; nor have the moral and human ties between them ever been either broken or relaxed; and in the long years and centuries to come, when this bad dream of Ottoman dominion shall have passed away from Europe, that union will still subsist and cannot but prevail, as long as a human heart beats in a human bosom.

In the midst of high and self sacrificing enthusiasm the Greek government and people have shown their good sense in pleading that the sense of the people of Crete, not the momentary and partial sense, but that which is deliberate and general, should be considered. The Greeks have placed themselves upon a ground of indestructible strength. They are quite right in declining to stand upon an abstract objection to the suzerainty of Turkey if it so pleases the powers. Why should not Crete be autonomously united with Greece and yet not detached in theory from the body of the Ottoman empire? Such an arrangement would not be without example. Bosnia and Herzegovina are administered by Austria; but I apprehend that they have never been formally severed from the overlordship of the sultan. Cyprus is similarly administered by Great Britain; and European history is full of cases in which paramount or full sovereignty in one territory has been united with secondary or subordinate lordship in another.

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But in thus indicating a possible solution I claim for it no authority. I exclude no other alternative compatible with the principles which have been established by the situation. These I take to be that, by the testimony alike of living authority and of facts, Turkish rule in Crete exists only as a shadow of the past and has no place in the future; and that there is no organ upon earth, subject to inde