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Rh  influence, and his adhesion cemented the Christian forces into a union they would have failed to attain without him.

Help in the shape of ammunition and guns has been sent privately from Montenegro, and some four or five hundred men have come thence to volunteer in the Herzegovinian army, which has, at last, apparently found a head in Lazar Sochicha. But Montenegro has complied with the requirements of international law, and has given the Porte no pretext for the execution of its threat to invade the mountain principality, although it must he obvious to all spectators that a successful attack there would be the quickest way for the Porte to control Herzegovina. But Turkey is in no position to pursue vigorously any object which requires money or good organization, and in her times of greatest strength the Montenegrins have ever proved unconquerable foes to her.

America is said to have offered her cannon on credit, and France has negotiated a loan which will suffice to provide the army with the arms yet wanting to them. Garibaldi has promised help to the Herzegovinians in the spring, and as the Turkish troops want long arrears of pay, and the barest necessaries of food and clothing, and are not accustomed to the rigour of a Herzegovinian winter, it is not improbable that in the early months of this year another Christian Slav province of Turkey will have freed itself from the terrible yoke of the Turk, and be either independent or joined to Servia or Montenegro.

It is true that the Porte has once more reiterated the empty promises with which its Christian subjects have been always familiar since, more than four centuries ago, they first were drowned in the flood of Mahometanism, and which have been thrown like dust in the eyes of Europe especially since 1857. But these "reforms" can come to nothing — they will always be like empty words. The idea of erecting Herzegovina into a separate province when the sultan dares not put any but a Mahometan or a base and corrupt socalled Christian into any of the responsible offices of State there is quite nugatory. He dares not, because whatever pressure may be brought to bear upon the central government by financial distress and the public opinion of Europe is unfelt by the Mahometans throughout the empire, who cling with furious determination to every privilege and power conferred on them in former times by a religion which treats all but Mahometans as the enemies of God and man, fit only for slavery and abuse.

At the same time, although theoretically it may be said — and it often has been said — that Turkey is peopled by Christians under the heel of Mahometans, it must be clearly remembered that that is by no means the whole of the truth. The truth is more nearly told by an author who says that all the evils which afflicted France before the Revolution must be doubled, and then aggravated by the bickerings and jealousies of Jews, Mahometans, Roman Catholics, members of the Greek Church, and renegades for lucre or safety, embittered as those bickerings and jealousies must be under such circumstances of intense suffering, all this must be imagined before any idea is reached of the condition of the inhabitants of some of the richest and fairest countries in Europe.

Once, in the fourteenth century, these provinces were the great Servian empire, long united in fact by their common descent and common language, and still more by the common faith and by the precious possession of a Bible in the vulgar tongue which is even now intelligible to all the Slavonian populations in Turkey, Free Servia, and Montenegro, Austria, Russia, and Poland. One of the first printing-presses was set up by a Montenegrin noble, who was made by Charles V. a baron of the Holy Roman Empire for this good work, and who devoted it chiefly to the printing of the Bible and books of devotion. The traveller through those lands can take no more welcome gift in his hand than either the old Slavonic version or that more recently prepared by the American missionaries and distributed by colporteurs of the Bible Society under their superintendence.

The time of union under an emperor was short, for the first who held that name was also the last. The present 