the evolution. That on Turkey, compiled between one mission abroad and
another, was the latest to be finished.

If our sympathies are not all the same, or given equally to friends and
foes, none of us would find it possible to indite a Hymn of Hate about any
Balkan people. Every one of these peoples, on whatever side he be fighting
to-day, has a past worthy of more than our respect and interwoven in some
intimate way with our history. That any one of them is arrayed against us
to-day is not to be laid entirely or chiefly at its own door. They are all
fine peoples who have not obtained their proper places in the sun. The
best of the Osmanli nation, the Anatolian peasantry, has yet to make its
physical and moral qualities felt under civilized conditions. As for the
rest--the Serbs and the Bulgars, who have enjoyed brief moments of
barbaric glory in their past, have still to find themselves in that future
which shall be to the Slav. The Greeks, who were old when we were not as
yet, are younger now than we. They are as incalculable a factor in a
political forecast as another Chosen Race, the Jews. Their past is the
world's glory: the present in the Near East is theirs more than any
people's: the future--despite the laws of corporate being and decline,
dare we say they will have no part in it? Of Rumania what are we to think?
Her mixed people has had the start of the Balkan Slavs in modern
civilization, and evidently her boundaries must grow wider yet. But the
limits of her possible expansion are easier to set than those of the rest.

We hope we have dealt fairly with all these peoples. Mediaeval history,
whether of the East or the West, is mostly a record of bloodshedding and
cruelty; and the Middle Age has been prolonged to our own time in most
parts of the Balkans, and is not yet over in some parts. There are certain
things salutary to bear in mind when we think or speak of any part of that
country to-day. First, that less than two hundred years ago, England had