[Footnote 90:  As to this, see Reports:  Condition of Christians in Turkey (1860).  Presented to Parliament in 1861.  Also Parliamentary Papers, Turkey, No. 16 (1877).]

Matters came to a climax in the autumn of 1875 in Herzegovina, the southern part of Bosnia.  There after a bad harvest the farmers of taxes and the Mohammedan landlords insisted on having their full quota; for many years the peasants had suffered under agrarian wrongs, which cannot be described here; and now this long-suffering peasantry, mostly Christians, fled to the mountains, or into Montenegro, whose sturdy mountaineers had never bent beneath the Turkish yoke[91].  Thence they made forays against their oppressors until the whole of that part of the Balkans was aflame with the old religious and racial feuds.  The Slavs of Servia, Bulgaria, and of Austrian Dalmatia also gave secret aid to their kith and kin in the struggle against their Moslem overlords.  These peoples had been aroused by the sight of the triumph of the national cause in Italy, and felt that the time had come to strike for freedom in the Balkans.  Turkey therefore failed to stamp out the revolt in Herzegovina, fed as it was by the neighbouring Slav peoples; and it was clear to all the politicians of Europe that the Eastern Question was entering once more on an acute phase.

[Footnote 91:  Efforts were made by the British Consul, Holmes, and other pro-Turks, to assign this revolt to Panslavonic intrigues.  That there were some Slavonic emissaries at work is undeniable; but it is equally certain that their efforts would have had no result but for the existence of unbearable ills.  It is time, surely, to give up the notion that peoples rise in revolt merely owing to outside agitators.  To revolt against the warlike Turks has never been child’s play.]

These events aroused varied feelings in the European States.  The Russian people, being in the main of Slavonic descent, sympathised deeply with the struggles of their kith and kin, who were rendered doubly dear by their membership in the Greek Church.  The Panslavonic Movement, for bringing the scattered branches of the Slav race into some form of political union, was already gaining ground in Russia; but it found little favour with the St. Petersburg Government owing to the revolutionary aims of its partisans.  Sympathy with the revolt in the Balkans was therefore confined to nationalist enthusiasts in the towns of Russia.  Austria was still more anxious to prevent the spread of the Balkan rising to the millions of her own Slavs.  Accordingly, the Austrian Chancellor, Count Andrassy, in concert with Prince Bismarck and the Russian statesman, Prince Gortchakoff, began to prepare a scheme of reforms which was to be pressed on the Sultan as a means of conciliating the insurgents of Herzegovina.  They comprised (1) the improvement of the lot of the peasantry; (2) complete religious liberty; (3) the abolition of the farming of taxes; (4) the application of the local taxation to local needs; (5) the appointment of a Commission, half of Moslems, half of Christians, to supervise the execution of these reforms and of others recently promised by the Porte[92].