hardly any national quarrel, against those with whom they are set to fight, march forth to settle some paltry point of honor, or to decide some intricate question of genealogy. It is true that, five-and-twenty years back, the heads of foreign enemies were set up on the tower of Cettinje. It may be as well to remember that, not much more than a hundred years back, the heads of domestic rebels were set up on Temple-Bar. It is hard to touch pitch, and not to be defiled; men who through so many generations have had to deal with the Turk may be pardoned if, in some of their doings, they have become a little Turkish themselves. And

as for being the pensioners of Russia, where is the crime? One-and-twenty years ago we chose to make an enemy of a people who had done us no wrong. Ever since that time it has been thought a point of patriotism to see some frightful danger to the human race in every act of that people and of all other people who can be suspected of any friendly dealings with them. The Russain bugbear is one purely of our own setting up. But, since it has been set up, to call any man or any nation a friend of Russia has been much the same as giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. I heartily wish that the Montenegrins were not pensioners of Russia. That is, I wish that they were strong enough to dispense with the help of Russia, or of any other power. But, standing as they have so long done, a handful of men defending their freedom against a vast empire, forsaken and despised by every other power, it is not likely that they should cast back the sympathy, or even the money, of the one great power, a power of their own race and creed, which has looked on them with an eye of friendship. We too have had our ancient ally; we have more than once thought it our duty, and made it our business, to support Portugal against Spain and against France. The relation between Portugal and England most likely seemed then in the eyes of Frenchmen and Spaniards as wicked a thing as the relations between Russia and Montenegro seem in the eyes of Turks and of Turk-loving Englishmen. It is only in human nature, and it is not a bad part of human nature, that people who are left to themselves to wage the most deadly of struggles should feel some attachment to the only friends whom they can find. If we

had made ourselves the friends, and not the enemies, of the Christian nations of South-Eastern Europe, they might now look to England instead of to Russia. As it is, as we have chosen to throw in our lot with their oppressors, it is not wonderful if they look instead to the one power which professes to be their friend.

Granting then that Montenegro has a feeling towards Russia which is very different from ours, the fact is not wonderful, neither is it blameworthy. But it is the existence of Montenegro which, above all things, gives the best hope that something better may be in store for the subject nations of South-Eastern Europe than simply to be transferred from one despotism to another. Doubtless there is a difference between a despotism which at least does justice between man and man and a despotism whose rule is one of pure brigandage. Doubtless there is a difference, in the eyes of those nations if not in ours, between a despot alien in blood and faith and a despot who would be hailed by all as a brother in the faith, by most as a brother in blood and speech. But the existence of Montenegro may perhaps show us a more excellent way than either. In the little state on the Black Mountain we see what the Eastern Christian can do. We see that he is able to defend its freedom for ages by his own right hand; and we see that, under rulers of his own blood, he is capable of making advances in civilization and good order with a speed and thoroughness which strike the beholder with wonder. If we read of Montenegro, as described by Sir Gardner Wilkinson twenty-seven years ago, and then go and look at Montenegro now, we shall at once see that there is no part of the world in which improvement of every kind has gone on with swifter steps than in this exposed out-post of Christendom. At the time of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's visit, the word "marauders" might perhaps not have been wholly out of place. No reasonable person would blame them for marauding back again, when their whole national life was resistance to a marauding expedition which had gone on ever since the Turk found his way into the Slavonic lands. But the fact of the marauding cannot be denied, any more than it can be denied that in Sir Gardner Wilkinson's time the tower of Cettinje was entwined with a garland of Turkish skulls. Few things are more interesting,

few more creditable in different degrees to all concerned, than the attempt of Sir Gardner Wilkinson to put a stop to this practice, and his correspondence on the subject with the reigning Vladika and with the neighboring Turkish governor. It shows, just like the history of Kallikratidas enlarged on by Mr. Grote, how hard a thing it is, when two people have long been engaged in internecine warfare, and in the savage habits which such warfare engenders, for either side to take the first step in the direction of more humane practices. At any rate the practice is stopped now. There are no longer any heads on the half-ruined tower. The practice of exposing the heads came to an end under the late Prince, and in truth, since Montenegro has held a more assured position, since her freedom was secured at Grahovo in 1858, there has been little or no room for the petty border warfare by which the heads were once supplied. But in Sir Gardner Wilkinson's day there was a far worse charge brought against the Montenegrins than anything they could possibly do to their Turkish enemies. They were then charged with playing the marauder on the other side, with coming down to commit various kinds of robberies in the neighboring town of Cattaro within the friendly territory of Austria. Such a thing is now unheard of. Robbery of every kind is utterly come to an end; there is no part of the world where property is safer, or where the traveller may go with less risk of danger, than within the bounds of Montenegro. Here then is a simple fact in the teeth of the gainsayer. Here is a portion of Eastern Christendom, a Slavonic and Orthodox state, which has made advances which thirty years ago would have seemed hopeless. No doubt Montenegro has stood in a special position and has enjoyed special advantages. But surely, when one branch of a race, when one community professing a creed, has done for itself what Montenegro has done, we cannot surely wholly despair of their brethren of the same race and creed who are as yet less fortunate.

There surely can hardly be, in any quarter of the world, a land of higher interest than this small spot of earth which has so long maintained its faith and freedom against the most fearful odds-this home of a handful of men who have for ages withstood all the assaults of a mighty

empire, and who have shown that, under wise training, they are no less ready to make advances in the arts of peace than to wield their weapons in the holiest and most righteous of causes. We hear much from various parts of the world about universal education, about universal military service. Montenegro is the paradise of both doctrines. There were times when it was doubted whether a man who could both fight and read was most properly called "miles litteratus" or "clericus militaris." In Montenegro every man is, or soon will be, at once clerk and soldier. That every man in Montenegro can fight their enemies have learned in countless battles; and, as the older generation dies out and the new generation comes up, every man and woman in Montenegro will be also able to read and write. In many eyes it must be an ideal land where military service is absolutely universal, where primary education is also absolutely universal-I may add where the ownership of land is universal also. In Montenegro, as in præ-historic Greece, every man goes armed; every man, dressed in the picturesque costume of his tribe, carries his pistol and yataghan in his girdle. But if he can wield pistol and yataghan, he can also turn either to his spade or to his pen. Here, and perhaps here only, in the modern world, we can see the very model of a warrior tribe, a nation of a quarter of a million, who have known how to maintain their independence with their own right hands, and who at the same time are making rapid strides to a higher place among civilized nations than some of the great powers of the world. They have of course been enabled to do what they have done by the nature of their country. It is because Montenegro is Montenegro that Montenegro has remained free. Their mountains have been to them what other mountains have been to Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, what dykes and sluices have been to the no less stout-hearted men of Holland and Zealand. The men doubtless could have done but little without the land, but the land could have done still less without the men. Away from their mountain fortress, the handful of men who have preserved the freedom of Montenegro must have sunk into the common mass of Turkish subjects. But without these men of stout heart and strong arm who so long have guarded it, the heights which

watch round Cettinje might have fenced in nothing better than the prison-house or the hunting ground of a barbarian conqueror.

Among all the many moments of a Dalmatian coasting voyage which at once kindle the fancy and elevate the heart, there is hardly any which comes home to us with a more living power than when we first come in sight of the mountain_rampart of the unconquered land. We enter the Gulf of Cattaro, the lovely Bocche, with their smooth waters, with their fertile shores fringing the bases of the bleak mountains which rise above them. It is hard to believe that we are on the waters of the Hadriatic; we seem rather to be sailing on some Swiss lake, where every landing place awakes some memory of the old days when freedom had yet to be striven for. And around these shores too still dwell the memories of ancient commonwealths; but they are commonwealths which suggest only the darker side of the history of the Alpine Confederation. The winged lion marks the rule of a Serene Republic; but it is a Republic whose rule was that of oligarchy within her own lagunes, and of despotism among the shores and islands of Dalmatia. Even Ragusa, deeply as we honor her long defence of her independence, deeply as we feel for her overthrow at the base caprice of an upstart tyrant, was still, after all, a commonwealth of the few and not of the many. And one result of the long rivalry between the two maritime oligarchies still casts a dark shade over one corner of that loveliest of inland seas. The jealousy of Venice and Ragusa could not endure that the land of one commonwealth should march upon the land of the other. And so, to keep the dominions of two Christian cities away from each other, at two points on the Dalmatian shore, the common enemy of Christendom was allowed to extend his wasting occupation down to the water's edge. The commonwealths are gone; but, even on the shores of the Bocche, a small strip of Turkish territory is still allowed to interrupt the continuity of Christian rule along the shores of the Dalmatian kingdom. Here at Sutorina, as at the other end of the old Ragusan lands at Klek, the Apostolic King still endures to have one part of his dominions cut off from another by the intrusion of a strip of

land which is still, in name at least, under the yoke of the Turk. Yet, as I write, the men who are waging the strife for right against their tyrants may, by some gallant deed done in a holy cause, have made that dark corner of the lovely shore as glorious in future ages as Marathon or Morgarten. We pass on along the windings of the gulf, and at last, almost in its inmost recess, we come to the little city whose name it bears. Cattaro nestles on its narrow ledge of inhabitable land between the smooth sea and the rugged mountains. The peaks soar above us; the walls of the city seem to climb up their steep sides, till they reach the castle of Cattaro, perched like an eagle's nest, among the rocks. Higher still we see the zig-zag road, the ladder of Cattaro, rising on and on, step by step, till it seems to lose itself in the tops of the rocks and the clefts of the ragged rocks. That is the road to the land which nature and man have combined to keep as a holy ground, the abiding fortress of right against wrong, of freedom against bondage, of Europe against Asia, of Christendom against Islam. It leads to the home of men whose history has been one long struggle against the eternal enemy, whose whole life has been one continued fight of Thermopyla or of Sempach, waged, not for hours or days, but for generations and for centuries. That steep and winding path is as yet the one way which leads from the haven of Cattaro to Montenegro, the smallest of European principalities, and to Cettinje, the smallest of European capitals. There, as we look up at the mountain rampart of that unconquered race, we learn, if anywhere, to cast away that shallow philosophy which measures objects, not by their moral greatness but by their physical bigness, the philosophy which keeps on its parrot-like sneer at petty states, though it sometimes finds that the moral strength of a petty state can outweigh the brute force of tyrannies of a hundred times its physical size. There, among those rocks, are a few square miles on the map, a few thousand souls in the census-book, who count alongside of kingdoms and empires as one of the elements in European politics. At the present hour, when right and wrong so nearly balance one another in the scales, we ask what course will be taken by those who sway the destinies of the vast lands, the endless

millions, of the Russian and Austrian monarchies. But we ask, too, as a question of hardly less importance, what course will be taken by the chief of a state whose whole population would be outnumbered by any one of half-a-dozen cities and boroughs in Great Britain. It may be that, even amid the scientific perfection of modern warfare, men have not been so wholly turned into machines, but that twenty thousand born warriors, every man trained, not only to wield his weapon, but to know why he wields it-every man of whom goes forth with a heart like that of Godfrey's Crusaders or of Cromwell's Ironsides-may even now count for more in the day of battle than many times their number, dragged to the field, fighting they know not wherefore, in obedience to no higher call than that of professional routine or so-called professional honor...

But I must not be so far led away by the thoughts which rise at the mere mention how much more than at the actual sight?—of this little land of heroes as to forget to give some short sketch of the land itself and its people, and of the circumstances, past and present, which have given the land and its people a place, and so important and distinctive a place, among the existing states of Europe. The land which its own people called Cernagora, but which is better known by the Venetian translation of its name,* was an outlying fragment of the great Servian kingdom, ruled by a prince who seems to have been the man of the Servian king. The history of Servia, till its revival in the nineteenth century, may be said to begin and end in the fourteenth. For a moment, under Stephen Dushan, who, not unreasonably, took the Imperial title, the greater part of what is now European Turkey formed part of the Servian dominions. It might not be too much to say that, at this moment, the strength and fame and greatness of the New Rome proved her own destruction and the destruction of Eastern Christendom. As it was with the Russian in the ninth century, as it was with the Bulgarian at the end of the tenth, so it was with the Servian in the middle of the fourteenth. At each of those times, things

I noticed that in Dalmatia the name was more commonly sounded after the manner of book Italian, Montenero. In the Slavonic name the should have the sound of ts.

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looked as if a Slavonic power-for the Bulgarians may practically count as a Slavonic power-was about to be enthroned in the seat of the Eastern Cæsars, to play, after so many ages, nearly the same part which the Frank had played in the elder Rome. Servia was a nation without a capital; the Byzantine Empire had become a capital without a nation. Had the two been joined together, had a Servian dynasty taken the place of the Palaiologoi, Eastern Christendom might, at the moment when the Turk first threatened Europe, have presented such a front to him as might have checked his further progress for ever. Mahomet the Conqueror himself could hardly have overthrown a power which united the national strength of Servia and the traditional majesty of Constantinople. that traditional majesty could not so far stoop as to let the New Rome become Servian. As then Constantinople could not become Servian, as Servia could not become Byzantine, Servia and Constantinople had both to become Turkish. The nation and the city together might have withstood the invader. Neither the nation without the city, nor the city without the nation, could withstand him. Both were swallowed up, and the nation was swallowed up before the city. Before the end of the century which had beheld the momentary greatness of Servia, the Turk held Servia as part of his own dominion, and hemmed in Constantinople, as the Servian had done only a few years before. But, while kingdom and empire fell, the little vassal state among the mountains still held out. The barbarian ruled alike at Belgrade and at Constantinople; but Cernagora, under a dynasty which represented the Servian kings by the spindleside, maintained its own independence against all attacks, and sent forth warriors to fight side by side with Skanderbeg. From that day to this the mountain land has been ceaselessly attacked. Its frontiers have sometimes been cut short; its capital has shifted its place; the Turks have affected to deem the land conquered, to include it within the bounds of a Turkish province, and to speak of its defenders as rebels. The Turks have more than once made their way to Cettinje and laid the capital of the little state in ruins. Once, early in the last century, the reigning Vladika had to flee to Cattaro, while