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128 signal argument in favour of his belief in a warlike future. He analysed the nations into those living and those dying, and pointed out that some are decaying as fast as others progress. The weak States, he said, are becoming weaker in the too intense rivalry of our epoch, while the strong States are becoming stronger. Therefore, he concluded it to be certain that "the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear."

And yet, if the recent history of Europe be considered even in the example most favourable to Lord Salisbury's view, some modification may be appended to his proposition, a modification serving to bring a principle of the European organism, not yet touched upon, into light.

Turkey is the classic case in point of a "decaying" nation, of a "sick man." And truly, the decrepitude of the invalid on the Bosphorus invited and caused a great European outbreak, not to mention minor disturbances, twice during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The first, the Crimean War, was due to Russia's conviction that the Turk was on his death-bed. A second conflagration began in 1875, when Herzegovina thought herself strong enough to defy the Crescent, and the flame spread right along the Balkans, burning the outlying homesteads of the sick man. We witnessed another stage of that process when, in the autumn of 1908, Bulgaria suddenly pro-