sort of transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),
was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere, and the Turk, the
great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle. The most
civilised of the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent dared to
attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as
unanswerable as Hittin. In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;
and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expending a type of praise
upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the
Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany;
Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the
appliances of that new servile machinery which was her secret; the
absolute identification of national subordination with business
employment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp.
Every other commercial traveller was pathetically proud of being both a
slave and a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken hands. The "sack"
of the boss was as silent and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And
the dream of the citizen was at an end.

It was under a sky so leaden and on a road so strewn with bones that the
little mountain democracy with its patriarchal prince went out, first
and before all its friends, on the last and seemingly the most hopeless
of the rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens
seemed other than disastrous; and even that was doubtful. For the
successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli while proving the gallantry
of the Italians (if that ever needed proving) could be taken in two
ways, and was seen by many, and probably most, sincere liberals as a
mere extension of the Imperialist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and
not as the promise of newer things. Italy, it must be remembered, was
still supposed to be the partner of Prussia and the Hapsburgs. For days
that seemed like months the microscopic state seemed to be attempting