vantages which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert.'

This class of persons, dependent on the mercy, caprice, or necessities of capital, have a very bad outlook. Capital uses them only so far as it suits its interests, and then abandons them, not concerning itself whether they have or have not means of living. Hopeless men are always disposed to listen to any proposal of arranging things on their behalf. To such persons the idea of looking for help within their own order-which is indeed the Order of Destitution-does not

occur to them. They see no avenue of self-help open to them. If they did, they would not be despairing. All they see around them is the big, glittering, opulent thing called 'Society,' which passes by them, unheeding them, except when it may turn to menace them on observing them restless. Any retaliatory suggestion, therefore, of taking contemptuous Society by the throat and making a popular distribution of its spoils, has attractions for them.

Instead of laying hands on the throat of Society, co-operators seek amendment by putting ideas of self-help into the heads of the industrious classes. They work not by revolution but by evolution. Capital, the hitherto unmanageable mother of progress, co-operation proposes to acquire for itself, and control its uses by equity. It has a device for saving money without laying it by, and of accumulating it without earning it. The early process is slow, but increases rapidly with persistence. Its first step is the store; the second, self-employment in workshops; the third, self-supporting villages—self-governed, self-sustained communities. Trades Unionists have already large sums of capital, and can enter on the path of self-employment when they see their way, and by withdrawing labour from the market raise wages without the cost of strikes. Workmen of spirit regard State Socialism as the small-pox of servility. Those unvaccinated with independence take it, and the abject have it very badly.

The State, not a thing independent of the people, but a system under the control of the people, should have charge only of those general interests which from time to time may be committed to it. As Society progresses, things not yet assigned to the State may come to be best performed by it; and it will cease to do many things it now does, as the capacity of self-government increases in the people. If towns may acquire lands for free parks, provide free libraries, free education (for a time), toll-less roads, improved streets, acquire waterworks, and gas-works, and taverns, the State may take upon itself other limited public duties and organise railway transit and even acquire the land, using the increment in the value for national expenditure as the public welfare or public policy may determine.

Free government is yet in its infancy, and the limits are not yet traced of State action and local life. Many consider that the State may represent the uniformity of law, protection, order, right, and

national economy; while Social life should keep free, industry, conscience, education, individuality, and progress. Of one thing we are sure, that the world has been too much governed by persons whose talent has lain chiefly in taking care of themselves. There have always been too many people ready to regulate society in their own interests, whereas the welfare of the world lies in the direction of self-government. Humanity has been too much sat upon by rulers, heaven-born and devil-born-the latter class chiefly prevailing. What is wanted is increase in the general capacity of self-government. The far-seeing prayer of Robert Browning should be put up in all the churches

Make no more giants, God,

But elevate the race at once.

What we want in society is no leadership save that of thought— no authority save that of principles-no laws save those which increase honest freedom-no influence save that of service. Then State Socialism will disappear like the Black Death and other obsolete pestilences. The English working class, if not brilliant, have a steady, dogged, unsubduable instinct of self-sufficiency in them, and never despair of going forward alone. Being a self-acting race, they are alike impatient of military mastery or paternal coddling, and in their crude but manly and ever improving way, they make it their business to take care of the State and never intend to allow the State to take care of them. State Socialism is the cry for organisation in life, which nascent popular intelligence desires, but at present is too uneducated to accomplish. Its seed, sown in servile ground, will find its fruition in independence. The age of giants' has disappeared in history and cannot be continued in politics. The rise of democracy forbids that. Education has at least awakened individualism, and the elevation of common life is the tendency of the age. The English revolution of Labour will proceed on the lines of self-help upon which it has been founded.

GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.

GREECE AND THE TREATY OF BERLIN.

THE EASTERN QUESTION has as many heads as the hydra. There is, however, one of them which, though all are endowed with an equal tenacity of life, does not now inspire, even where morbid feeling is most rife among us, the same sentiments of terror and misgiving as the rest. This one is the Hellenic element in the vast and complicated subject; which, and which alone, has at last been happily detached from considerations fatal to mental equilibrium, and which has been placed upon a basis sufficiently simple by the Twenty-fourth Article of the Treaty of Berlin, together with the Thirteenth Protocol of the Congress.

The treaty states, in its Twenty-fourth Article, that if Turkey and Greece should fail to agree on the rectification of frontier indicated in the Thirteenth Protocol, the six cosignatary Powers reserve it to themselves to offer their mediation to the two parties, in order to facilitate the negotiations. In the Thirteenth Protocol, the Congress had invited the Porte to arrange (s'entendre) with Greece on a rectification of frontier in Thessaly and Epirus; and had delivered its judgment that this rectification might follow the valley of the Salambrias (the ancient Peneus) from the eastward side, and that of the Kalamas from the westward. The Salambrias issues into the Gulf of Salonica near its mouth, the Kalamas has its sortie opposite Corfu. The head waters of both descend from tracts lying considerably northward of the point at which they join the respective seas: and it may be said that a line fairly traced between them would make an addition of between one-fourth and one-third to the superficial area of the Hellenic kingdom.

A few words may be added to show how strictly the territory embraced by this decision of the Congress ought to be regarded as (what was called at Constantinople in 1877) an irreducible minimum. It does not cover, or nearly cover, the whole of the territory inhabited by a people properly Hellenic: for the ground where the Slav begins to mix with the Hellene lies far beyond it. Setting apart, then, the question whether Turkey might justly have stipulated for a money payment in respect to her cession, we may safely say that the limit of the district thus marked out is far more confined than the principle

on which it is founded. Secondly, it is greatly more restricted than the proposal actually made by England in 1862. On the cession of the Ionian Protectorate, and the annexation of the Islands to Greece, the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, on his proposal and that of Lord Russell, unanimously determined on advising Turkey to make over to Greece the whole of Thessaly and of Epirus.' Thirdly, it was a great abatement of what France had endeavoured in the pourparlers, or bye-meetings, of the Congress to obtain for Greece, and what she had only consented to forego in consequence of a prudent desire to neutralise the resistance of England.

Such was the proposal in itself. It was one eminently favoured by circumstances. In all the territorial questions, which had arisen respecting the Slav territories, the British Plenipotentiaries at Berlin took and held, with impunity, the side adverse to freedom; because the respective populations were suspected, with more or less justice, of being tainted with Russian sympathies. But the Hellenic part of the subjects of the Porte were at length understood to be in a different position. There had slowly dawned upon the mind of England a perception of the palpable fact that the relative attitudes of Greece and Russia had undergone a fundamental change since the time when there first began to be a Turkish question.

In the war, which ended with the great Treaty of Kainardji, the Greeks had, naturally enough, been fascinated with the very first tokens ever given by a Christian Power of an interest in their fate; and they committed themselves freely on the Russian side. Abandoned by that Power in the final arrangement, they then received their first lesson on the dangers, which attend upon hasty partnerships between the feeble and the strong in the vicissitudes of war. At the commencement of the diplomatic preceedings which led to the establishment of free Greece, Russia proposed, under the name of a plan of emancipation, a scheme based upon the same ideas as the contemporary organisation of the Danubian Principalities; which would have broken up the race among a number of Hospodariates, and would thus have thrown all hope of a true Greek nationality into an indefinitely distant future. At the same time, it is not to be denied that by her military operations, which brought about the Treaty of Adrianople, she obtained at the last stage a principal share of the honour belonging to a real, though unfortunately a very limited, emancipation. There was accordingly, when the Crimean War broke out, some, though not a very vivid, residue of Russian feeling among the population of the Kingdom.

This statement, which I have made, in Parliament and elsewhere, on former occasions, is confirmed by a letter of Mr. Evelyn Ashley in the Daily News of May 20, evidently from documentary evidence in his possession: which, however, does not include the fact that the overture to Turkey was made with the full authority of the Cabinet of that day.

But new combinations of commanding interest for Russia had now risen upon the political horizon. The germs of new-born life among the subject races of the Turkish Empire were no longer confined in their manifestations to the Hellenic portions of the Empire together with the Danubian Principalities. The autonomy of Servia had been established with Russian aid; and the Government of the Czar found larger prospects opening before it, as it was enabled to embrace the Slav populations generally within its sympathies or its projects. A further development arrived, which again, and yet more seriously, altered the relations between Russia and the Christians of European Turkey. This was the struggle of the Bulgarian Church to emancipate itself, not from the religion, but from the ecclesiastical control of the Patriarch of Constantinople. For about a century, or since 1777, the appointment of the Bulgarian Bishops had rested with that See, and the consequence was that their Church was ruled mainly by prelates of Greek nationality, whose reputation as pastors did not stand high, who were not always to be found in their dioceses, and in whose persons was first palpably exhibited a latent antagonism between Hellene and Slav, as competitors for the succession to the Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe. In the meantime, a sense of national life had been awakened in Bulgaria, and it has been powerfully aided by the successful struggle for ecclesiastical independence. Russia, which appears at first to have acted with the Greeks, finally went to the Bulgarian side; and has not only not supported the Patriarch in his sentence of excommunication, but has, according to the allegation made in Greek quarters, sequestrated or laid an embargo upon the produce of estates in Russian territory, with which the Eastern Church was partially endowed. These few sentences do not aim at giving so much as a sketch of a long and complicated story, but are intended simply to draw attention to the fact that a sharp, and almost an exasperated, opposition has now been established between Slavonian and Hellenic influences; that Russian policy is fundamentally estranged from the leading interests of the Greeks; that the See of Constantinople and its followers, little to their credit, ostensibly took the side of the Turks during the late war; and that, though the Patriarch may have acted under compulsion, yet it has been clearly shown that a dread of Slav preponderance, and of Russian interest or intrigue in connection with it, has become a powerful and even a ruling motive with most of the rival race.

This division is to be deplored in the interest of liberty at large. But for England, which has been rent by sharp dissension for the last three years with regard to all that concerned the Slavonic races, it has had some very great advantages. It has completely extricated one large portion at least of the Eastern Question from the cloud of prejudice, the eddies of passion, and the labyrinth of political intrigue. The promotion of Hellenic interests is now at any rate effectually