varied and extensive commerce, of which I have already mentioned to you the principal branches. The success of it depended entirely upon the maintenance of order in the surrounding districts, and my prosperity and native prosperity were one. Natives who had been hunted or feared to be sold would not have traded with me, and if they did not trade with me I could not trade with the caravans. You can judge of the truth of this by what happened afterward, when I went to Darfour and left Idris Abtar at Mandugba. He permitted slave-hunting, and the whole business fell away. There is nothing now in those countries which can compare with my trade. When I first went down with Ali Imouri, although slaves were never a principal object of our trade, we did occasionally buy and sell a few if the natives brought them with other things. Since I left him I have never had anything to do with slaves; and as I had no percentage on his profits, I may say with truth that I have never sold a slave. I had nothing to do with the trade in Urihamo's country, except that I bought slaves, and the caravans passed through my country and used my name. As for my having thirty slave stations, as you say, it is absolutely untrue. I never sent a slave down to Cairo or Constantinople in my life."

Of all the statements with regard to his slave-trading which 1 repeated or read to the Pasha none seemed to vex or wound him so much as Dr. Schweinfurth's categoric assertion that he had sent down about 1800 slaves in the year between 1870 and 1871. "Schweinfurth saw many people going down," he said, "and assumed that they were my slaves; but why did he not ask me, and I would have explained to him truthfully, as I did about all else? There were caravans of slaves, that year as always, with which I had nothing to do. There were also that year many of the families of Balali's discontented soldiers. Balali's presence, about which I will presently tell you, created circumstances which a stranger would not understand. Dr. Schweinfurth was not with me long enough to enter into them by his own judgment; but if he had asked me I would have

told him. I received him well. We were very friendly, and he asked me many interesting questions. To all of these I gave truthful answers, and I would have willingly told him about the slave-trade. He never spoke of it to me, and it astonishes me that so wise a man should write thus hastily of what he did not know. You have no means of testing the accuracy of what I tell you; but he, if it interested him, might have inquired into it all upon the spot, and this would have been a better return for my hospitality than to have spread a report which is not true."

Shortly before the period of Dr. Schweinfurth's visit Zebehr had succeeded in bringing to a successful issue negotiations which have a considerable bearing upon this subject. Between Mandugba and Kordofan, at twenty days' distance from Mandugba, the country was infested with marauding and slave-hunting tribes of Bedouins, who rendered the caravan roads quite unsafe. The most important of these tribes were the Rezigats. Of the long list mentioned by the Pasha, the only other name which I could find upon a European map was Tawaisha (N. lat. 12°, E. long. 27°). As the commerce of Mandugba increased, the necessity for new roads made itself more and more felt, and Zebehr resolved to see what could be done to clear a channel for trade through Kordofan. He accordingly sent an embassy to the chief of the Rezigats, bearing presents for the chiefs of all the tribes, and requesting them to come or to send delegates to Mandugba, that he might discuss the terms of a treaty with them. He made great preparations for this event, and received them with high honor. At the meeting which followed he spoke to them, as he had done to his own chiefs, of the advantages of trade and open roads. He told them that he was well acquainted with their habits, and knew that they were accustomed to enrich themselves by attacking caravans, and stealing both the goods and the men of which they were composed. But he pointed out to them that the result had been only to desolate their own country, and to drive trade from their roads. Caravans did not pass where they knew they would be attacked, and prizes

and effective reforms at home will secure for the Porte zealous and active allies abroad. Russia's policy on the Bosphorus has been, and to-day is, controlled by Ignatieff's maxim, that under sufficient pressure Turkey can always be relied upon to yield. But when a man has retired to the very edge of a cliff he cannot be as pliant as when concession cost him little. At the same time it would be idle to deny that, even if the possession of Constantinople itself is to become the gage of war, Turkey can no longer rely blindly on the support of England. There is a modern school of politicians inclined to assert that the system of Turkish government is so bad, the whole administration so corrupt and so incongruous, that, come what may, no nation which would preserve its self-respect can any longer remain allied to the Porte. Therefore, "Perish Turkey, England has no longer any interest in the politics of the Mediterranean." Even the prospect that, with Russia on the Bosphorus, England would lose all the rich trade of the Levant, has but little influence with these philosophers, who, with Western aspirations looking to Canada and the growth of British communities in the far-off Southern seas, are deliberately turning their backs upon the involvements of Europe and the East. But this school is probably not very numerous, and when the crisis of the Eastern question does come, it will be impossible for England to refuse to play her part in its settlement.

England has in India some 50,000,000 of Mussulman subjects, including in their mass the most warlike of the native races, the races upon whom England must chiefly rely to roll back the tide of Russian aggression; and England is not likely to forget that it was these very races who, in 1857, at the bidding of their Caliph, the Sultan Abdul Medjid, gave their united support to the British connection at that supreme moment when their defection might have cost the life of every white man and woman in India. My late father frequently assured me that the whole influence of the Califate was used most unremittingly from Constantinople to check the spread of the Mutiny, to rally to the English standards the Mussulman races of India, and

that in this way the debt which Turkey owed to Great Britain for British support in the Crimea was paid in full. And the time may again come when the devotion of the Mussulmans to their Calif and the shrine of St. Sofia may be not less necessary to Great Britain than in 1857. I am aware that in the Western world the religious sentiment of nations is no longer considered an important factor in politics, but it would not be wise to regard any such maxim as applicable to the East. The myriads who to-day in the hottest regions in the world keep for an entire month each year the fast of Ramadan-entire abstinence from all food and water between sunrise and sunset while continuing their full daily toil-the religious zeal that has endured this trial steadfastly for more than a thousand years at the bidding of the Prophet, is not likely to look on unmoved when his shrine at Mecca and his tomb at Medina have become the objective points of foreign aggression. The enlightened classes in India recognize that the rule of England has secured us against incessant internal strife, involving a perpetual exhaustion of the resources of our communities, and also that by a just administration of equal laws a very sufficient measure of individual liberty is now our birthright. We have lost, as some think, our national liberties, which after all were merely the liberties enjoyed by despots to compel their subjects to make war on one another; this so-called "liberty" is denied us; but more than 240,000,000 of us have now the right to live our own lives on what lines we please, and to be subject only to the control of a known, a written law; and this being so, the one further inducement needed to keep the Mahommedan millions forever steadfast in the British connection is the bond of a religious faith and a cherished conviction that, being the loyal subjects of the Great White Empress, we are therefore the strongest link in the natural alliance between our Queen and our Calif, between the temporal power in India and the spiritual power that radiates from the Bosphorus. And herein is the strength and the determination of our objection to any further Russian growth in the direction of India. It is less our dislike

to exchange a constitutional for a despotic rule, for we attach but little importance to mere theories of representative government; but we do all recognize that in Russia we are confronted with the natural and the unrelenting enemy of the head of our faith, and if we are destined to see Russia on the Bosphorus and the shrine of Mecca in her possession, where then may the faithful look to find the defender of their faith, the great Emir-al-Mumenin? But it is hardly necessary. I suppose, to further emphasize the strong objection Mussulman India has to the Russianizing of the Bosphorus. Every British instinct and tradition points also in the same direction. There are many who may consider that the author of Greater Britain has formed an exaggerated estimate of the military resources of Russia, but there is no one who can contemplate Russia on the Golden Horn, her fleets patrolling the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Egean, her garrisons in the forts of the Dardanelles, without a feeling that Asia and all Central and Eastern Europe might a little later become the subject and the serf of a Panslavic despotism.

The real strength of the non-intervention party in England probably lies in the natural objection to continue to play a part in what promises to be a very endless, a very bloody, and a very costly political issue; and I freely admit that if forever and forever the Bosphorus is to be held in an always-weakening grasp, if the inducement supplied by that weakness is ever to urge Russia forward to breaches of the peace of Europe, that then it would be reasonable for England to retire in despair. But the growth of events during the past ten years, and especially during the past few months, appears to promise at the present moment a solution of the Eastern question both final and satisfactory, and to offer also to the great powers some prospect of final relief from the burden of vast standing armies and that taxation which is necessary to support their prodigious military establishments.

Any recent visitor to Turkey cannot fail to have been struck by the general expressions of the friendly feeling that Turks entertain for Austrians; and now

that, however reluctantly, every intelligent Turk has come to recognize that some modification of the status of Turkey in Europe has become inevitable, that only by a friendly agreement and a joint administration with some strong military power can Turkey hope to avert a much-dreaded Russian occupation, Turkish attention is now focussed on Vienna. Nor is this surprising, for the war clouds that impend over Eastern Europe, and the aggressive despotism which is feeling its way both eastward and southward, are hardly less a menace to the future of Austria than to the Osmanli themselves. It is better therefore that these threatened nationalities should make common cause before it is too late, before they have been compelled to succumb one after the other. But this is by no means the only reason for the growth of closer sympathies between the two nations; for Austria seems to have solved, or at least to be moving rapidly in the direction of a right solution of, that most difficult of all the problems of government-namely, how to control and keep together, without internal disturbances, several distinct nationalities differing both in race and religion. An enlightened system of Home Rule, co-operating with an extended franchise, has so brought it about that in the Austrian Empire today the several families, Slavs, Germans, Latins, and Magyars, are living under one roof in very tolerable harmony. I am aware that the Austrian system has many detractors, and it is often said that the federal connection is so loose that from a military standpoint Austria is enfeebled. But if this is so, if Austria's aggressive capacity is diminished by decentralization, then for that very reason a partnership with Turkey would be the less dangerous to the weaker partner. And, too, this suggested reconstruction is the more attractive, not only to the Danubian principalities, but also to Germany and Italy because of its immense defensive force if attacked by Russia, its comparative powerlessness for any purpose of wanton aggression.

Germany is a power in Europe whose interests make for peace; there is nothing so important to Germany as not merely present peace, but the prospect of such conditions of stability as would

justify a partial disarming. Germany has commercial projects intended to to create a colonial empire, and which are quite incompatible with the present strain on her resources, the consequence of a vast war ever imminent. The federation of the Balkan Peninsula under Austrian auspices is a policy that cannot fail to recommend itself to Prince Bismarck; it is the natural sequence of the policy which Russia herself inaugurated, and which the German Chancellor so warmly supported in 1878. At that time Russia was very busy establishing and strengthening the various Danubian kingdoms. Bismarck saw clearly that such morsels as Bulgaria would be far from digestible when the day came that Russia desired to swallow them, and this Russia now finds to be the case. Russia has had her chance and lost it; being determined to despotize and centralize, she has forever estranged herself from her own offspring, so that to-day the local jealousies of Bulgaria, Servia, and Roumania are almost merged in view of the common peril of their absorption by Russia.

Italy also could see in the Austrianizing of the Balkan Peninsula nothing to awaken her suspicions. The events of 1866, if not forgotten, were so uniformly favorable to Italy that they left behind no after-taste of enmity. The immense recent constitutional changes in Austria, too, are the best guarantee to other powers that the growth of Austrian influences will be a very pacific growth in deed, and that a strong Austrian confederation implies the continued peace of Europe. Probably, for supporting the copartnership of Turkey and Austria on the Bosphorus, Italy might receive those southern portions of the Austrian Tyrol where to-day only the Italian language is spoken.

And if Turkey on her side requires a fighting partner to insure her the possession of the Bosphorus, Austria needs for her industrial development the deepsea harbors of Marmora and the Egean. Even Russia herself is less cramped for the want of ports and of seaboard than is the Austrian Empire, cabined and confined as now to use outlets such as Trieste and Fiume, which are locked and barred from the commerce of central Austria by the lofty ranges of the

Carinthian Alps. Far too much has been said about the policy of advancing Austria to Salonica. Such an advance would not settle the Eastern question in the smallest degree, and is merely one of those political make-shifts intended to bridge the interval between one war and another, and to defer till some more convenient season a real and a final settlement.

But what view would public opinion in England take of this suggested reconstruction in the East? pivotal point of all. It is certain that Russia will antagonize any such settlement even to the point of war, and in this she will be supported, at least diplomatically, by all the power of France. If we may argue from recent disclosures, any such proposed copartnership as that of Turkey and Austria on the Bosphorus will evolve some diplomatic manifesto from Count Montebello which will quite throw into the shade even his candid counsels last July. For were Russia in future to be checked and controlled by this immense federation, France would have to keep the peace of Europe at the mandate of Germany and Italy.

The present efforts of the ambassadorial "conspirators' of Therapia and Buyukdere can at best, it is said, only delay the evil day, and whether it comes in three months or in three years, war is assumed to be inevitable. The present incursion of Prince Ferdinand into Bulgaria may probably precipitate the crisis; but, on the other hand, if a conference could meet and rearrange the map of Europe on some such lines as I have ventured to sketch, it is not impossible that Russia might accept the position and war might be averted; but if war is inevitable, then the thing most to be desired is finality, and it may well be that, if the issue was fairly put before the English electorate, Will you permit Russia to seize the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to destroy your trade with the Levant, and demoralize the conditions of your rule in India-will you permit all this or, on the other hand, spend, if necessary, twenty millions sterling in a final effort, which will certainly be successful, to settle the Eastern. question ?-it seems reasonable to suppose that a nation so proud of its achievements and traditions as Great