assise,' as Villehardouin describes it, for the attack on Constantinople. A century later, in 1306, Gallipoli was captured by the roving, body of free lances called the 'Grand Company of the Catalans.' They held on to the place as long as they cared; they stood a siege or two, defeated every army sent against them, and, after bleeding the country white, retired at their leisure to seek new fields for plunder. And then came the Turks. They had already secured, with small exceptions, the whole of Asia Minor; their capital was at Brussa, and they had a wide choice of directions from which to make their final attack on Constantinople. They were led by their military instinct to fix on the Straits, and on Sestos as the vital point. When Suleiman Pasha, the son of Orkhan, decided on the great adventure in 1356, he did not even take an army. With a picked body of a few hundred heroes, he crossed the Straits on rafts by night, and surprised Justinian's impregnable castle of Choiridokastron. The fall of the place was worthy of its name; it is said that most of the garrison were absent, employed on agricultural work, and the walls were easily scaled over a great heap of manure stacked against them. Next year the Turks, working northwards from Sestos, had seized Gallipoli, and made it their bridge-head for a further advance. By 1361 Adrianople was in their hands, and the capital was cut off from the west. The final fall of Constantinople was delayed for nearly a century by the astounding and wholly unforeseen attack of Timur aud his Mongols on the Turkish rear, and the defeat and capture of Bayezid; but none the less the fatal blow to Constantinople, as to Athens, was delivered at Sestos. It is characteristic of Byzantine fatuity that the Emperor John Palæologos should have received the news of the capture of Choiridokastron with the inane jest, After all, they have only taken a pigsty.' Constantinople fell at last in 1453. Mohammed the Conqueror was not the man to neglect a vital point in the defence of his new capital as his predecessors had done; and his victory was hardly won when he set about securing the Straits. But the year 1453 marked many ways the beginning of a new era, the end of the Middle Ages; among others, it had established the in power of heavy artillery. Mohammed had no need to waste a fleet in holding the Straits now that they could be commanded by guns. But new conditions involved a new point of defence. It was the harbours which fixed the naval point at Sestos and Abydos. But for guns the question depended upon range, and the Straits were not narrowest here. The general width at the upper end of the Narrows is about 2500 yards, and is nowhere less than 2200. Four miles lower down, the Straits contract to 1400 yards; and it was here that Mohammed the Conqueror placed his two forts, the Old Castles' of Chanak and Kilid-ul-bahr. Till February last both stood intact; Chanak, with a massive square central keep, faced by Kilid, a picturesque tower planned in the shape of a trefoil or heart. Both were armed with guns throwing huge stone shot up to 1000 lb. weight, incapable of being trained, and discharged only as a ship came into the line of fire. The toll-station and seat of administration moved down to the forts; and the population followed. The town of Chanak or Dardanelles sprang up; and Sestos and Abydos were finally deserted. The site of Abydos now holds only forts and their garrisons. No foreigner is allowed to land there; but a century ago almost all remains of antiquity had disappeared. The stones had been carried off to build the houses of Chanak; and it is doubtful if the most diligent archæologist would now find anything to reward a search. The site of Sestos is a ploughed field; the only visible remains are the walls of 'Pig's Castle'; and the only inhabitants are the family of the farmer who is employed not only in tilling the soil, but in tending the 'tekkeh' which stands before the gate of the castle-the tomb of one of the Turkish heroes who fell in the assault. The two forts stopped the passage, but they could not prevent approach. Venetian fleets more than once sailed up to and threatened the Narrows; and in the 17th century the range of guns had improved sufficiently to make it worth while to defend the outer entrance. The two New Castles' of Kum Kale and Sedd-ul-bahr were built by the Vizier Köprülü just after the middle of the century, and strengthened in the 18th by Baron de Tott, who added also the battery on the site of the ancient Elæus, at the eastern end of Morto Bay. Since then the Straits have only once been forced, by Sir John Duckworth in 1807. The Turkish Government had at that time almost relapsed into the imbecility of their Byzantine predecessors; and little resistance was offered to the upward passage; but, while Sir John was kept in play by the diplomatists at Constantinople, the forts in his rear were hastily strengthened by French engineers. The admiral had to retreat lest he might be cut off, and in descending the channel he suffered not inconsiderable loss from the huge stone cannon-balls of the guns. So it is that the centuries from the days of Troy onwards have contributed their memories of war to the shores of the fifteen miles of water between Sestos and Troy. Even Priam's Troy was not the first. Below the feet of Priam and Hector there lay yet older Troys of which they knew nothing; many centuries must have passed since the days of the Second City' where Schliemann found the great treasure of gold and silver, jade and amber, proving that even at that remote date the holding of the Straits was the source of wealth and power. And below the 'Second City' again lie the rude and humble walls of the first-how many centuries older still who can say? Of those ancient cities no other record has come down to us; but in their remains forty centuries look down on the present battlefields as surely as they did from the Pyramids on the armies of Napoleon. Troy has once more arisen to block the west, and at last we may look for the fulfilment of the prophecy of Juno in Horace: 'Troiæ renascens alite lugubri WALTER LEAF. Art. 7.—NIETZSCHE AND GERMAN EDUCATION. 1. The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Eighteen vols. Edinburgh and London: Foulis, 1909–13. 2. Nietzsche: Tendances et Problèmes. Par Virgile J. Barbat. Zürich und Leipzig: Rascher, 1911. 3. Nietzsche und die Kulturprobleme unserer Zeit. Von A. Kalthoff. Berlin: Schwetschke, 1900. 4. German Higher Schools. By James E. Russell. New York and London: Longmans, 1905. 5. Die Reform der höheren Schulen in Preussen. Von M. Caspar. Berlin: Emil Felber, 1913. 6. Rembrandt als Erzieher. Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890. Von einem Deutschen. SOMEBODY once remarked that when the French conquered a country they founded a parliament, the Germans a university. It is very difficult to characterise, as it is to arraign, a nation in such brief terms, but the author of that epigram has done it with remarkable success and unusual insight into national psychology. For it is a fact that the rulers of Germany for the last two hundred years have seized upon education as the best instrument with which to further their designs. And that is a novel and unexpected policy for kings to adopt. Education, it has generally been assumed, means enlightenment, and, as such, it is to be denied to the populace. Autocrats and democrats, in countries other than Prussia, seem to have agreed upon one point, namely, that education and political or social progress go hand in hand. Thus the policy of all other reactionary rulers in this regard has been negative; the despots have always refused to impart what the demagogues persistently demanded. But the Kings of Prussia, from Frederick the Great to the present German Emperor, have followed a positive course of greater intellectual danger to their subjects and of infinitely more sinister import for the rest of the world. I mean that what we may call, in most of its bearings, the peculiarly Prussian ideal of the State as the be-all and end-all of existence, has been helped forward by the Prussian educational system to an undreamt-of degree. Another tendency in German education, one which is, of course, considerably subordinated to the requirements 6 of King and Fatherland but is noteworthy nevertheless, is towards utilitarianism. Frequently the demands of patriotism and those of material progress are identical. For example, it was the present Emperor who, by a celebrated speech in the year 1890, virtually set in motion the gradual abandonment of the classics which has progressed continuously, if in some instances slowly, up to the present. Despite the protests of a large number of humanists, amongst whom Professors WilamowitzMoellerndorff, Uhlig and Jaeger were the most conspicuous, the dropping of humaner studies has proceeded apace, especially in Prussia. For the discarded subjects natural science was substituted at the wish of those desirous of seeing Germany industrially and commercially great, and patriotic geography and history at the wish of the Emperor, who, to quote his own words, wanted to see the schools turn out 'young Germans and not young Romans or Greeks.' The struggle was not merely between classical' and 'modern' education; most modern languages, French perhaps more than any other, may be held to possess, if taught properly, a cultural value comparable even with Latin or Greek. But the issue was really far wider. It was, in effect, between education directed towards culture in the French or Anglo-Saxon sense, and education directed towards the production of subservient State officials or successful men of commerce and industry. The various protesters were quick to see the point. Prof. Paulsen, in a plaintive article written at the time of the change, did not expatiate on the value of Greek or Latin civilisation to the modern world. He confined himself to the question of whether the same liberality was being shown by the Government to the modest needs of philology and philosophy as towards applied chemistry, engineering and the like. His answer was a regretful negative. A well-known pseudonymous laudator temporis acti, one among many, signing himself 'Schwarzseher' (Pessimist), made the now trite assertion that in modern Germany 'an active interest for natural science and technical improvements is not balanced by a deeper concern for the mental sciences and the arts.' Even Heinrich von Treitschke felt and expressed the same despondency. A sentence he wrote in 1895 seems to echo, curiously enough, Nietzsche's |