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was in favour of Imperial Federation, for he wrote in his Wealth of Nations:

There is not the least probability that the British Constitution would be hurt by the union of Great Britain and her Colonies. That Constitution, on the contrary, would be completed by it, and seems to be imperfect without it. The assembly which deliberates and decides concerning the affairs of every part of the Empire, in order to be properly informed, ought certainly to have representatives from every part of it. That this union, however, could be easily effectuated, or that difficulties, and great difficulties, might not occur in the execution, I do not pretend. I have yet heard of none, however, which appear insurmountable. The principal, perhaps, arise not from the nature of things, but from the prejudices and opinions of the people, both on this and the other side of the Atlantic.

The 'prejudices and opinions of the people' opposed to the unification of the British Empire are now far stronger on this side of the Atlantic than on the other, and it is noteworthy that they are far stronger among the professional politicians than among the people.

The consolidation of the Empire is necessary and is urgent. Guided by the considerations which have inspired the foregoing pages, a few men have resolved to make a special effort for the promotion of practical Imperialism. As every great political campaign requires an ample amount of money, they have created a fund, and they have appealed to the public for support. Their appeal has been successful. In a few weeks a very large sum has been subscribed. This sum is to be the nucleus of a fund which, it is hoped, will eventually reach seven figures. It will in course of time become a great Imperial foundation. It will support every Imperial movement and endeavour worthy of support throughout the Empire. The income derived from it will be used in assisting the activity of the numerous excellent organisations in every part of the Empire which are truly Imperialist in aim and spirit, which strive to advance the interests of the British Empire and to elevate the British race.

As the most immediate need of the time is the unification of the Empire by Tariff Reform and a system of inter-Imperial preferences, it is proposed to devote in the beginning the resources of the fund to the promotion of the Chamberlain policy. This will be done, not for party reasons, not because the Unionist party has identified itself with Tariff Reform and Imperial reciprocity, but because Mr. Chamberlain's policy is the only one which can bring about the federation of the Empire. This policy stands high above party. There are two kinds of Imperialism: arm-chair Imperialism and practical Imperialism. The Liberal Imperialists are unfortunately only arm-chair Imperialists. As

practical Imperialism is more important than theoretical Imperialism, the Imperial Fund is intended to promote the former. The fund is, as its name implies, an Imperial fund. Its originators wish to work for the benefit of the Empire and of the British race in every practicable way, and they will make the unification of the Empire a party question only if Liberal Imperialists refuse to co-operate. They would prefer to work with the best men of both parties, and as their efforts will be devoted to a policy in which all citizens of the Empire can unite, it is hoped that they will be supported by the Imperial-minded men and women of all parties.

WESTMINSTER.

NICOLAS OF MONTENEGRO AND THE CZARDOM OF THE SERBS

THE mists which have for ages obscured the Balkan peninsula are at last rolling away, and States with kings and governments are emerging into the sight of Europe and, what is much more important, of the camera. And yet to the average Westerner the Kings of the Balkans are like the three Kings of Chickeraboo, comic-opera potentates, who have taken the place of the smaller German grand dukes and princes of the days of the Second Empire. To London and Paris the Near East is an unknown land, further off from them than Japan or Central Africa, an unreal land, full of people who wear fancy dress and many weapons, live in stage sets, and generally comport themselves as peasants in the musical chorus. Only the Turk is real in this stageland, and even he is the Turk of the nursery, the Bogey Man, the Unspeakable, who is classed with infidels, and oppresses the Sunday-school Christian with the arsenal of weapons at his girdle. To the man in the street the fighting in the Balkans is unreal, or at best only an exciting game at which we look on but do not play. The slaughter of Turks, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians means no more than the sweeping away of an equal number of Chinese by famine, pestilence, or the sword; indeed, it means less, for we have more money invested in the Flowery Land. But the photographer is doing his best, and as the armies of the larger Balkan States are dressed in European fashion, the West may gradually come to treat the Near East seriously, and not merely as a picturesque pastime for diplomatists.

This land of barren mountain and fertile plain has been fought over more furiously than any other stretch of Europe except Belgium. While the Western barbarians settled down into nations and kingdoms on the wreck of the Roman Empire, this borderland of East and West has always been the cockpit of warring nationalities; the more so, because the Turks, its latest conquerors, are essentially a nomad race, who have never absorbed the peoples they subdued, and have been beaten in the arts and crafts of the townsman and the trader by the subject races, and consequently are merely strangers and tent-dwellers

in the land. Ever since Suleiman the Second was checked before the walls of Vienna the Turks have been receding in Europe, and for over a hundred years the ambitions of the States and peoples who were submerged by the Ottoman invasion have been sources of constant trouble to Europe, whose terror of the Turk has been replaced by the hatreds of little States and the jealousies of Great Powers.

When the final blow came in 1453, and the Greek Empire fell at the storming of Constantinople, the Sultan occupied the throne of the Basileus as the ruler of the Near East, and when the Ottoman power began to weaken it was naturally the Greek, who had never forgotten the imperial purple, who first put in a claim to the succession and for the restoration of the empire. But the Serb and the Bulgar had, in the days before the Turk, carved fugitive and precarious empires of a day out of the tottering and decaying realm of the Byzantine sovereign, and they too clamour that the Czardom of their chieftains shall be reconstituted in the face of Europe and they themselves exalted, with their enemies and rivals crushed beneath their feet. But if history is to be ransacked for the remodelling of the Balkan peninsula in the twentieth century, there is but one claimant who has any right at all to the succession of the Byzantine Emperors, and that is Greece, where at least the language, religion, and traditions of Byzantium have been kept alive. For nearly a thousand years the Emperor of Constantinople was the Emperor, in spite of that simulacrum which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. His was the one great and magnificent figure which embodied in all men's eyes the twin ideas of empire and Christianity. The transient and barbarian Czars of the Bulgar and the Serb might transliterate the potent name of Caesar into Czar to give themselves the appearance of imperial rule, but they were really tribal chieftains who held sway only by the sufferance or the weakness of the sovereign born in the purple.

Of the nations that have once more risen to the surface as the flood of Ottoman invasion recedes the Roumanians may be dismissed at once. They are on the far side of the Danube, and they have no pretensions to rule at Constantinople. Greece is ruled by a Danish King who succeeded a German, in default of the great princely families of medieval Greece, but stranger things have happened than the rule of a northern prince at Byzantium. Did George of Greece become Emperor of Constantinople he would have a precedent in Baldwin and the Latin Emperors, who ousted the Greeks for the first half of the thirteenth century. The Bulgarians, who in the days of their power made even less impression on the country than the Turks have done, also had to resort to Western rulers when they regained their

independence, for though originally their form of government was aristocratic, none of their nobles or great families had survived the Turkish domination. They have no claim to rule at Constantinople, and the Bulgaria they have now obtained is, with perhaps some additions to the south-west, a just and ample reconstruction of the shifting dominions of the Bulgarian Czars.

The Serbs remain, and they with far more reason have made the return of the Czardom of Dushan and Lazar a national aspiration. This it was that inspired them when they rose under Karageorge as the Bulgarians were never inspired by the memories of Simeon's victories; for to the Serb the battle of Kossovo is modern history, and while the Bulgar of to-day is utterly modern the Serb looks back through the ages to the great days of Serbian rule when he scattered broadcast those placenames which still attest how wide and deep was his influence in the Balkan peninsula. The Bulgarian Empire left hardly a trace; the Serbian Czardom has set its mark everywhere. If the Serbian Czardom were to be reconstituted there would be two claimants for the headship, Servia and Montenegro; but though of the same race the two are very differently qualified. After the battle of Kossovo and the fall of the Serbian rule, most of the great land-owning families became Mahometan, and thus retained their power, finally becoming the mainstay of the Turkish supremacy in Europe. The consequence was that, when the Servians rose in 1804, after the massacre by the Janissaries, they chose as their leader George Petrovich, or Karageorge, the son of a peasant, who had served in the Austrian army, and had afterwards been a brigand and pig-dealer. The present King Peter of Servia is Karageorge's grandson. The Obrenovich dynasty, which ended with the murder of King Alexander of Servia, was founded by Milosh Obrenovich, a Serbian peasant who, when Karageorge temporarily gave up the struggle in 1812, got himself named chief by the Turks, and in 1817 had Karageorge assassinated; thus originating the blood-feud whch only came to an end with the extinction of the Obrenovich dynasty in 1903.

But both these dynasties are essentially modern. They have no root in the past, and the Serbs look back to Dushan and Lazar and to the heroes who fought with them as the glories of the Serbian race. Yet there is one family which, though not descended from the old Serbian Czars, has ruled over free Serbs for more than two hundred years, and has therefore juster claims than any other dynasty to represent the ancient Czardom, and that is the family of Petrovich Niegush of Cernagora, whose head is, and has been for over fifty years, King Nicolas of Montenegro. The little kingdom was never subdued by the Turks, although it was overrun more than once, and even before its independence was

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