army has been drilled and equipped after the Prussian fashion, the finances placed on a tolerable footing, and practical independence of Turkey asserted.  At the Vienna exhibition Roumania was the only one of the nominally-vassal states that did not display the star and crescent.  Were the prince unrestrained by respect for Austrian and Prussian diplomacy, and free to lead his well-disciplined army of fifty thousand men into the field, he would give the signal for a general uprising in Bosnia and Servia, and thus probably succeed in severing all the Christian provinces from the Porte.

In one essential feature the Germanization of Prussia in the Middle Ages differed necessarily from any like movement now possible along the Danube.  The Vends, Serbs and other Slaves were heathens, and their overthrow and extermination was a crusade as well as a conquest.  The Church consecrated the sword, the monk labored side by side with the knight.  Such is not the case in the Danube Valley.  Whatever value we may set upon the Christianity of the Slovenes, Herzegovinians, Bulgarians and Roumanians, we certainly cannot call them heathens.  They belong to the Roman Catholic, to the Greek, or to the Greek United Church, although their worship and religious conceptions are strongly tinged with reminiscences of Slavic paganism.  Neither is a conquest, in the military sense, possible.  Public opinion in Europe has learned to look with abhorrence on such violent measures, not to speak of the mutual jealousies of Austria, Russia and Germany.  The question is rather one of peaceful colonization, of the introduction of Germans in large numbers, and the gradual adoption of Western improvements.  Without some strong influx of the sort the mere separation of the Danubian principalities from Turkey would be only a halfway measure.  It would put an end to the outrageous tyranny of the Turkish governors, but it would not ensure industrial and intellectual progress.  And if Germany does not undertake the work, where else is aid to be looked for?  We see what the Germans have done for us in the valleys of the upper Ohio and Mississippi.  We have only to imagine a like stream of population rolling for twenty years along the Danube.  Some of the conditions there are even more favorable than they have been with us.  The German colonist in America has been confronted from the start by a civilization fully equal to his own.  In the Danubian principalities he would rise at once to a position of superiority.  The cessation of German immigration would be undoubtedly a loss to America, but its diversion to the south-east would be a great gain to Europe.  It would settle, perhaps, for ever, the grave question of race-supremacy—­it would enable Austria to become a really German power, and Vienna a really German city.  Last, but not least, it would reclaim from Mohammedanism and barbarism lands that were lost to Christian culture only five centuries ago in a moment of shameful weakness.