astonished world that the processes of Byzantinism survived to the present day.  Five years later followed the assumption by Prince Ferdinand of the title of “Tsar of the Bulgarians,” and it then only required the occurrence of some opportunity and the appearance on the scene of some Balkan Cavour to bring the struggle of centuries to the final issue of a death-grapple between the followers of aggressive Christianity and those of stagnant Islamism.

The whole tale is at once dramatic and dreary, dramatic because it is occasionally illumined by acts of real heroism, such as the gallant defence of Plevna by Ghazi Osman, a graphic account of which was written by an adventurous young Englishman (Mr. W.V.  Herbert) who served in the Turkish army, or again as the conduct of the Cretan Abbot Maneses who, in 1866, rather than surrender to the Turks, “put a match to the powder-magazine, thus uniting defenders and assailants in one common hecatomb.”  It is dreary because the mind turns with horror and disgust from the endless record of government by massacre, in which, it is to be observed, the crime of bloodguiltiness can by no means be laid exclusively at the door of the dominant race, whilst Mr. Miller’s sombre but perfectly true remark that “assassination or abdication, execution or exile, has been the normal fate of Balkan rulers,” throws a lurid light on the whole state of Balkan society.

But how does the work of diplomacy, and especially of British diplomacy, stand revealed by the light of the history of the past century?  The point is one of importance, all the more so because there is a tendency on the part of some British politicians to mistrust diplomatists, to think that, either from incapacity or design, they serve as agents to stimulate war rather than as peace-makers, and to hold that a more minute interference by the House of Commons in the details of diplomatic negotiations would be useful and beneficial.  It would be impossible within the limits of an ordinary newspaper article to deal adequately with this question.  This much, however, may be said—­that, even taking the most unfavourable view of the results achieved by diplomacy, there is nothing whatever in Mr. Miller’s history to engender the belief that better results would have been obtained by shifting the responsibility to a greater degree from the shoulders of the executive to those of Parliament.  The evidence indeed rather points to an opposite conclusion.  For instance, Mr. Miller informs us that inopportune action taken in England was one of the causes which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities between Greece and Turkey in 1897.  “An address from a hundred British members of Parliament encouraged the masses, ignorant of the true condition of British politics, to count upon the help of Great Britain.”