I believe that this estimate does ample justice to the Mussulmans, and less than justice to the Christians. I leave the Jews and Gypsies out of the calculation because they are outside the sphere of national aspirations. We have, therefore, before us the case of 15,340,000 Christians ruled over by a population of 2,700,000 Mussulmans vastly inferior to themselves in intelligence, in education, in virtue, and, in short, in all that constitutes capacity and aptitude for the various duties of social and political life.1

But in order to put the anomaly at its real value we ought to subtract the Slave Mussulmans from our calculation. There is the widest possible difference between these and the Turks, whom, indeed, they regard with feelings of invincible contempt. They are mostly descended, as we have already seen, from Christian forefathers who apostatised to escape the mournful doom of the Rayah. But they have never forgotten their Christian ancestry; and in many a Mussulman household among the valleys of Bosnia and on the slopes of the Balkans are fondly cherished traditions and memorials of the faith which their forefathers bartered in exchange for the rights of freemen. Some of these heirlooms, presented to Bishop Strossmayer by Mussulman friends in Bosnia, I saw in his

Vice-Consul Maling in a report on the condition of the Christians in Turkey, addressed to Lord Stanley in 1867, explains as follows the total denial of justice to the Christians:'That this system should receive the support of conscientious Mussulmans, as it does, can only be explained by concluding that they regard it as a necessary defence against the Christian, whose immeasurable superiority in intellect, education, and aptitude for industrial and all other pursuits would beat the Turk out of the field altogether but for the arms which the executive and tribunals put into his hands.'

palace at Diakovar last September. They are interesting specimens of the progress of the arts in Bosnia before the Turk came in to blight it all. The Mussulmans of Bosnia have no antipathy to Christianity as such. Some of them have near relations on the Austrian side of the Save with whom they keep up a regular intercourse, including an occasional exchange of visits. In some of the Mussulman households, too, the feasts of the patron saints of the family in the old Christian days-S. Peter, S. Elias, S. George-are still observed; and it is said that it is not rare for a Mussulman father to order mass to be said for his sick child, nor for a young Bey to get a Christian priest to pray at the grave of his deceased parents.

The Slave Mussulmans are fanatical, no doubt, but it is the fanaticism of caste rather than of religion. Of Islam, in its theological and religious aspect, they know little and care less. As a rule, they do not understand Turkish, and the Koran is a sealed book to them, except such knowledge as they pick up of its contents at second hand. It is but rarely that they practise polygamy, and their women are at liberty, whenever they choose to avail themselves of it, to go abroad without the customary veil. This has given rise to the Turkish proverb: Go to Bosnia if you would fall in love with your bride.' Let the Slave Mussulmans of Bosnia and Bulgaria be convinced that the abolition of the Turkish rule does not mean the abolition of their hereditary rights, and they will view the exit of the Ottomans not with equanimity merely but with warm approval. The rule of the Turk has never been popular with the Mussulman Slaves, and they have more than once risen up in arms against it. In the last revolt of the Beys of Bosnia they solicited the co

operation of their Christian brethren to shake off the yoke of the common enemy of both; but the Machiavellian craft of the Porte frustrated the combination, and the Christians, deluded by a budget of false promises, enabled Omar Pasha to put the Mussulman insurgents down. Hence the animosity with which the latter have turned upon the Christians in the recent insurrection. It is an animosity fanned by the lex talionis and the jealousy of caste, and not to any appreciable degree by religious zeal; and it is carefully cultivated by the crafty Turks, who, not satisfied with falsifying the liberal promises which they made to the Christians through Omar Pasha, took away from them the few privileges which they had previously enjoyed, and placed them completely at the mercy of the Mussulman proprietors, now exasperated against them for siding with Omar Pasha. The Porte has thus contrived to cause a bitter feud between the Mussulman and Christian Slaves of Bosnia, which it will take some time to heal. But the time need not be a long one, if Turkish officialism, the root of all the mischief, is removed. The Mussulman landowners of Bosnia are a fine and generous body of men; brave, high-spirited, and resentful against wrong; but truthful, honest, and never, like the Turk, cruel in their vengeance. Such is the character given to them by Bishop Strossmayer, who knows them well, having often been a welcome guest at their houses. He thinks that if they were only rid of the demoralising influence of the Government at Constantinople, they would not only soon learn to live in peace with their Christian neighbours, but even gradually—he believes in about fifty years-return to the religion of their forefathers.

The Slave Mussulmans of the Empire, therefore,

are evidently not a force upon which the Porte can permanently rely, and they may fairly be debited to the Christian rather than to the Turkish side of our reckoning.1 We shall then have, on the most liberal allowance, 2,000,000 of ignorant, unprogressive Turks (including Turkomans and Circassians), with a government essentially barbarous and irretrievably corrupt, tyrannising over a subject population of some 16,000,000 of superior races, who need only one thing to make them prosperous and happy-the precious gift of freedom.

But merely to say that the inestimable blessing of freedom is denied to the Christian subjects of the Porte is to convey a very inadequate idea of their miserable condition. If we would understand the intolerable wretchedness of their lot we must follow out the practical working of the Ottoman system of government as it affects the ordinary life of the oppressed Rayah. This I have done through piles of Blue Books and other sources of information. I have read with great care all the Parliamentary Papers published in England during the last twenty years on the condition of the

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1 I have come across the following strong confirmation of this opinion since these words were written:-'I hope,' remarked Mr. Nassau Senior, in the course of conversation with Mr. Consul Blunt, that the Mussulmans and Christians may be so far fused, by the enjoyment of equal rights, as to be loyal subjects to one Government.' 'I hope so, too,' he answered; 'but in the parts of Bulgaria which I know best, that is, Macedonia and Thessaly, it will not be the Government of the Sultan. The Mussulmans of these countries are as disaffected to the Constantinopolitan Government as the Christians are. They have a hundred times said to me, "When will you drive those hogs out of Constantinople?"'-Nassau Senior's Journal, kept in Turkey and Greece, p. 191.

Christian subjects of the Porte. They consist partly of ambassadors' despatches, but chiefly of consular reports. I have also read works written by foreigners -English, French, German, Italian, American-not casual travellers, except in two cases, but men who resided for years in the districts which they describe, and who relate in calm and moderate language the result of their own experience. They belong, moreover, to different religions, and to none: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Irish and American Protestants, Jews, Agnostics. They write quite independently of each other, from different motives, and with different aims; but they all tell the same harrowing tale of brutal oppression on the part of the ruling race, and intolerable wrongs, endured without possibility or hope of redress, by the ruled. It is of course impossible to convey to the reader's mind the impression made upon my own by the mass of facts which I have collected and sifted; but I think I can produce evidence enough to convince him that the Christian subjects of Turkey are absolutely without security for any of the elementary rights of humanity whether in person or property. They are in fact outlaws in their own land, for they cannot call anything, not even life itself, their own. They are entirely and in every respect at the mercy of their oppressors. This is a dreadful accusation against a government in defence of whose integrity and independence England has spent enormous treasures and lavished the blood of thousands of her bravest sons. Whether it is more dreadful than the facts fully justify the reader shall now have an opportunity of judging for himself.