Gladstone as the western advocate of Balkan freedom was slightly
shadowed by the fact that Gladstone did not succeed in effecting the
bodily capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch knew that if a
malefactor were the terror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects would
expect him personally to take arms and pursue the ruffian; and if he
refused to do so, would very probably experiment with another king. And
the same primitive conception of a king being kept for some kind of
purpose, led them also to expect him to lead in a foreign campaign, and
it was with his own hand that he fired the first shot of the war which
brought down into the dust the ancient empire of the Grand Turk.

His kingdom was little more than the black mountain after which it was
named: we commonly refer to it under its Italian translation of
Montenegro. It is worth while to pause for a moment upon his picturesque
and peculiar community, because it is perhaps the simplest working model
of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic social machine I
have described in the last chapter--stood in its path and was soon to be
very nearly destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the Serbian stock
which had climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie, and thence, for
many hundred years, had mocked at the predatory empire of the Turks. The
Serbians in their turn were but one branch of the peasant Slavs,
millions of whom are spread over Russia and subject on many sides to
empires with which they have less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the
broad features which are important here, are not merely Slavonic but
simply European. But a particular picture is generally more pointed and
intelligible than tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with subtler
tendencies; and of this unmixed European simplicity Montenegro is an
excellent model.

Moreover, the instance of one small Christian State will serve to