Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/382

 fact in a wonderful way. Like the colonies of Old Greece at an earlier day, like the dominions of Venice at a later day, the dominions of the Eastern Cæsar were cut down to a system of islands, peninsulas, strips of coast, maritime possessions scattered here and there over a large part of Europe. From the coming of the Slaves till the overthrow of the Bulgarian kingdom at the beginning of the eleventh century, there was no great continuous Imperial territory anywhere but in Asia Minor. Things had come back to the days before Roman dominion. The Greek, as for this purpose we may call him, again occupies the Ægæan, Hadriatic, and Euxine coasts. His rule reaches from Venice to Cherson and Trebizond. But the inland part of the wide land between the Hadriatic and the Euxine is again alien, in his eyes barbarian. From the Danube to Olympos — for a while from the Danube to Peloponnesos — the inland parts are Slavonic or Bulgarian, while the coast remains Greek or, in the northern part of the Hadriatic, Italian — in either case, Imperial. And this state of things in a manner abides still. The disposition of races remains much the same; the only difference is the political one, that Constantinople in Ottoman hands exercises a power over the inland regions which it did not exercise in Byzantine hands. Now as then, along a vast range of country, the coast is mainly Greek; the inland regions are mainly Slave. And in one corner, the older state of things is still more completely brought before our eyes; the coast and the interior are separated, not only by race, but by political allegiance. There is no more instructive lesson in history than that which is taught us by the revolutions of the narrow strip of Dalmatian coast and of the vast mainland to the back of it. For a few centuries, Illyria was one of the most prominent and flourishing parts of the world, renowned above all things as the land which gave the world its rulers. It was so, because, for those few centuries only, the coast and the interior were not divided. Before the establishment of the Roman dominion, Illyria counted for a barbarous and backward land, hard indeed for conquerors to subdue, but where civilization was confined to a few Greek cities on its coasts and islands. Under the Roman peace, the body and its natural mouths were brought together. Jadera flourished; Pietas Julii flourished; Salona was one of the great cities of the earth; and from Salona came forth Diocletian. But Diocletian was only the greatest of a long line of Illyrian princes before and after him. The border-land of East and West might worthily claim to supply East and West alike with its rulers. With the Slavonic immigrations all this ceased; the body was again cut off from the mouths and the mouths from the body. The interior became barbarian; civilization was again shut up in the coast cities which still clave to the empire. Salona fell, and Spalato rose in its place; but, in the changed state of things, Spalato could not be what Salona had been. Tossed to and fro between various masters, Byzantine, Venetian, Hungarian, French, and Austrian, the Dalmatian cities have ever since been cut off from the land behind them. Ragusa, independent within living memory, was, from her very independence, yet more isolated than the rest. We all say, and we say truly, that Montenegro must have a haven. We feel it by simply looking at the map; but we feel it tenfold more keenly when we look down from the Black Mountain itself on Cattaro and her mouths — the Bocche, the city and haven of which the men of the Black Mountain were so shamefully robbed — on the narrow rim of land which fences in the Bocche, and on the wide Hadriatic beyond. We feel pent up in prison without an outlet. But what is true of Montenegro is true of the whole land; the body is still everywhere cut off from the mouth and the mouth from the body. Those lands will hardly send forth another Aurelian, another Diocletian, another Constantine, as long as two parts of them which is essential to the prosperity of each of the other are thus unnaturally kept asunder. Here then we come to some of the great difficulties which surround what is called the Eastern Question, difficulties of the present which, like most difficulties of the present, are an inheritance of the events handed on from the past. When the Turk is gone, "bag and baggage" — that is, of course, the gang of official oppressors, not the Mahometan population whom no one wishes to injure, and who may in truth be counted among the victims of the official Turk — when the Turk in this sense is gone, there will still be other difficulties to grapple with, difficulties which were in full force before he came. There will still be that separation between the coast and the interior, which exists more or less 