They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.[2]
[[2]] Tennyson's well-known sonnet.
By the creation of Albania Montenegro was debarred from any great territorial gain out of the partition of the Turks' old estate in the Balkans, and was shut back on her mountains, as it seemed irrevocably. Servia and Greece were left with almost as serious grievances. Albania therefore is a constant source of temptation to a war of enterprise on the part of three of the Balkan nations, and the war only awaits a favourable opportunity to break out: a pretext for it can always be supplied at a day's notice by some border collision with the wild and lawless Albanian clans. Should the war in Albania spread to her neighbours, Bulgaria, outraged and mortified by the Treaty of Bucharest and again robbed and humiliated by Turkish encroachments on her powerlessness after that Treaty, in all probability will seize the opportunity to make a war of requital on some one of her neighbours, and the Balkan Peninsula will then be again drenched in blood. There will be again a cry of shocked horror from Western Europe as to these "quarrelsome and bloodthirsty" Balkan peoples. But in fair play and justice there is more reason for the little Balkan peoples to be shocked and horrified at the cold-blooded policy of the Great Powers who, for their own ends, create conditions which make peace in the Balkans impossible.
The truth is that these little shreds of peoples, in the blood-soaked Peninsula which destiny marked out to be the great battle-ground of races, have been used as pawns in the great game of European diplomacy ever since the fall of Napoleon. It will be recalled that one of the earlier dreams of that ambitious genius was to enter the service of the Sublime Porte and reorganise the power of Turkey. The crumbling away of the power of the Turkish Empire, which had given centuries of anxiety to Christian Europe, was at that time apparent. A great genius might then have restored the fighting power and the prestige of Islam. But Napoleon turned to other work and Turkey went on decaying. There soon arose a question as to who should be the legatee of the "Sick Man of Europe," and legacy hunters, some fawning, some clamorous, gathered at his bedside. To some of these it soon occurred that there would be wisdom in hastening the process of division, and that a means to do this was to question the moral right of the Turk to the Christian provinces over which he ruled. In the state of public feeling in Europe at the time it was most convenient to question this right on the ground of the religious intolerance of the Turk.
Without joining the party of the "pro-Turks" it is clear that that ground was more of a pretext than a reality. The Turk is not a religious persecutor to anything like the extent to which the Christian has been a religious persecutor. On coming into Europe he never sought, for example, to destroy the Greek Church, and I do not think that there is any clear evidence that Turkish misrule was founded at any period on intolerance carried to the degree of murder for faith's sake. The fault rather of the Porte's rule was the dreadful corruption and incompetence of the Turk as an administrator and the Turkish ideas of the status of women-folk—ideas which gave to Moslem women rights derived from their Moslem men-relatives, but regarded Christian women as if they were cattle without owners. I think that it was the adoption by European Powers of religion as a pretext for interfering in the Balkans which has been largely responsible for the religious bitterness there. It would make the situation more clear and give a better hope for the future if Western Europe would frankly recognise that the fervid interest taken in the Balkan Peninsula for about a century has had no other reason generally than territory-hunger.
When Turkey began showing signs of falling to pieces, Russia made an early claim to the succession of "the Sick Man's" estate. Russia wanted a warm water-port; and her territories would have been nicely rounded off by the acquisition of Turkey in Europe. These were the real reasons, not publicly expressed, for her Balkan policy. Less real reasons, kept in the foreground, were that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church was at Constantinople, that Russia was the kinsman of the Slav populations in the Balkans, and that her duty and right was to liberate co-religionists who were suffering from religious persecution.
Great Britain was the great obstacle to the desire of Russia to march down upon Constantinople. Her real objection was that with Russia on the Bosphorus the control of the Mediterranean might pass into the hands of the rival who seemed to wish to dispute with her for the mastery of India. Her expressed reasons had some vague declarations about the "chivalry of the Turk." Austria developed her ambition to suzerainty over the Balkan Peninsula mainly on the strength of a claim to be the heir of the old Holy Roman Empire, and as such possessing an hereditary right to rule over the old seat of that Empire in the East. Italy was forced into a Balkan policy by the impossibility of allowing a rival Power to settle on the other side of the Adriatic, threatening her whole east coast. Germany and France came into Balkan politics chiefly as allies of Powers with more direct interests, although both have now fears and hopes regarding the Asiatic dominions of the Sublime Porte and shape their Balkan policy accordingly.
A YOUNG WOMAN OF THE ROUSTCHOUK DISTRICT