was given as would satisfy the country-a point by no means attainable with ease:' and at last, I was made "happy by finding that Gibraltar was to be retained by 'England.' From all which it appears certain that, though not taking up the uncompromising attitude attributed to Keppel or Richmond, Grafton was very far from agreeing with Shelburne and the king; and that, in fact, the difference of opinion on this was mainly the cause of his retiring from the Ministry a month later. There were, indeed, other points of divergence, and Grafton seems to have expressed himself with a freedom that was not to the taste of either monarch or minister.

'Lord Shelburne,' he writes, 'instigated, I believe, by the Court, would gladly have received Lord North and his friends to strengthen his administration. Others, I doubt not, were equally disgusted with such an idea; but I owe it to my friend Lord Camden as well as to myself to say that we both frankly told Lord Shelburne that we would never listen to a measure so disgraceful in itself and revolting to our minds.'

This opinion naturally included the coalition shortly afterwards formed between North and Fox, and something of it he told to Fox himself, though without breaking the personal friendship which continued to the last. When, on the downfall of the Coalition, Pitt formed his Cabinet, he was desirous that Grafton should join it; not so much, we may believe, for any active assistance that Grafton could give, as for his social rank and his reputation as an honest man. Grafton, however, declined; and though he continued to take an interest in politics, it was as a friend of Fox, an opponent of the Government. Of Pitt's foreign policy he never approved. But he never again took office, never again gave an opportunity of questioning his conduct; and his mere opinion on public affairs has but little interest and no importance. The value of the autobiography rests on the clear picture it gives of the writer's own character and, incidentally, of the character of the writer's friends and acquaintances. The Duke of Grafton was a better judge of men than of things, and, without meaning it, distinctly portrays his incapacity, his want of energy, his want of firmness, which rendered him, at times, the unwitting or unwilling instrument of one or other of the greedy and selfish men by whom he was surrounded. As a man, his character will stand higher than it has hitherto done; and as a minister he appears as one to be pitied rather than blamed; the victim of circumstances which he could not control, the bearer of a burden beyond his strength.

ART. X.-1. Notes from a Diary in Asiatic Turkey. By LORD WARKWORTH, M.P. 1898.

2. Our New Protectorate. By J. McCOAN. 1879.

3. Germany's Claims on the Turkish Inheritance. Publications of the Pan-Germanic League. Munich: 1896.

4. Report on Railways in Asiatic Turkey. By MAJOR E. F. G. LAW. (Turkey No. 4: 1896.)

FEW

Ew countries that have played so great a part in the world's history, that possess such natural resources awaiting their developement, or that hold out so many attractions to the traveller, are so unknown as Asia Minor. The best parallel is perhaps to be found in the case of Spain. The resemblance, indeed, goes beyond mere companionship in neglect. In their physical features, and still more in their history, there are many points which suggest comparison between the two peninsulas. Both were Roman, both for centuries the battle-ground between Christianity and Islam. The most bigoted and most militant form of each creed triumphed both in the East and in the West. With Granada, and with Constantinople-for Constantinople in its history belongs to Asia Minor-fell, almost together, the last bulwarks of a higher civilisation. The house of Osman and the house of Castile worked and strove in the same spirit, absorbing Seljuk emirates, or Gothic kingdoms, warring steadfastly for the true faith, and building up, on the foundation of their genuine successes, vast ill-compacted empires, inevitably destined to crumble to pieces in the hands of their successors. To conquer and to maintain these empires Asia Minor and Spain have both been depopulated and impoverished. Happily for Spain, she is at last quit of that burden of empire she knew not how to sustain. But thousands of brave, obedient Anatolian peasants have still to die in Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace before any Osmanli sultan can resign his claim to the conquests of his ancestors, or turn his attention from the task of keeping down alien nationalities in a permanent state of suppressed revolt to that of reorganising and enriching his own people.

One of the reasons for the want of interest displayed in the history of Asia Minor is that it has always been treated by historians merely as a province of various empires. For Persian and Roman times this view is true

enough; but it is profoundly untrue for the rest of its history. For most of the period, from the beginning of the eighth century onwards, Asia Minor has been the centre and life of empires whose outer confines have extended far into Europe, Asia, and Africa-though the capital of Asia Minor has always, except during the short-lived dominion of the Seljuk sultans of Rûm,' lain without its own geographical limits. The Byzantine emperors, as long as they ruled the greater part of Asia Minor, were powerful sovereigns in Europe as well. With the loss of Asia Minor, Constantinople sank, almost at once, to the capital of a petty principality. For two centuries the Turks have been gradually driven back in Europe, stubbornly contesting every inch of ground. It is the Anatolian peasant that has covered the long retreat from Vienna to Belgrade and Nish, from the Don to the Danube, and from the Danube across the Balkans to the walls of Adrianople; it is the Anatolian taxes that have provided sinews for the long and hopeless struggle against foreign foes and rebellious subjects.

Again, our histories are more nearly concerned with the fate of the western half of the Roman Empire, for out of its ruins our modern civilisation has sprung up. But the Roman Empire, in any true sense, had perished in Western Europe long before the end of the fifth century. The Holy Roman Empire, however profound its influence on the history of Europe, was a political concept, and not a political fact. The real Roman Empire, with its organised administration, with its military roads, with its long chain of frontier fortresses, survived only in the East. In Asia Minor, possessed of a defensible land frontier, a large population, and vast wealth, that empire maintained itself for centuries after it had perished elsewhere. The population and wealth gradually decreased, the busy municipal life slowly stagnated into the routine of fixed castes, the farmers dwindled away as the land fell more and more into the hands of large owners, the burden of taxation became too great to bear; after a while the ravages of war, earthquake, or pestilence were no longer repaired. Yet it was not till the close of the eleventh century, nearly seven hundred years after the German invasion had swept over all Western Europe, and five hundred years after the Slavs, Pechenegs, and Bulgars had overrun all the lands between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, that the final break-up of all things came in Asia Minor, and, in a new Völkerwanderung,' the Turkish

tribes pitched their camp among the ruins of Roman cities, and blotted out the last vestiges of Roman civilisation. Once realise that for four centuries Asia Minor was the Roman Empire, and its whole history before and after becomes invested with a new meaning. Throughout all these centuries the Byzantine monarchs had struggled with varying success to defend Asia Minor against the Persians and the Arabs. The frontiers continually shifted backwards and forwards with the changing fate of war. How many times the great fortresses of Amida and Edessa were besieged and relieved, taken and retaken, almost passes count. Nor was the heart of the country itself always secure from invasion. Again and again the armies of Chosroes and the Caliphs marched to the shores of the Bosphorus. centuries Syria and the south-eastern provinces of Asia Minor were lost to the empire. The incursions of predatory bands of Arabs rendered the open country unsafe for scores of miles within the nominal frontier, and contributed to the miseries of the population. In the tenth century fortune inclined once more to Byzantium. John Kurkuas, Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II. reconquered the old territories of the empire up to Lebanon, and beyond the mountains of Armenia.

For

But Asia Minor was too much exhausted by the long struggle of the empire against the Bulgarian in the west and the Arab in the east; its resources were inadequate to provide for the defence of a greatly extended frontier, or for the administration of newly conquered territories. And just as Heraclius had only driven back the Persians to pave the way for Arab conquests, his successors, four centuries later, weakened the Arab Caliphate and annexed the independent buffer States of Iberia, Georgia, and Armenia, only to open a clear path for the Seljuk Turks into the very heart of their dominion. From this last onslaught the empire never recovered. The battle of Manzikert, or Melasgerd, in 1071, where Alp Arslan defeated and made prisoner the brave but reckless Emperor Romanus, was the deathblow of the Roman Empire. All the events that follow between 1071 and the final overthrow of the empire by the Crusaders in 1204 are merely incidents in its dissolution. Over-taxation, misgovernment, and absentee landlordism had already grievously thinned the agricultural population of Asia Minor. The Turks now poured like a flood over the face of the country, exterminating, driving before them, or absorbing the original inhabitants. Scarcely twenty years after Manzikert, Kilij

Arslan fixed his capital at Nicæa-almost at the very gates of Constantinople. The Crusades came too late to stem the tide of Turkish conquest. Within a century of Alp Arslan's invasion, Asia Minor had become a Turkish country. Rarely has so complete a displacement of one race by another taken place in so short a time. The north-western corner of the peninsula and parts of the northern coast alone remained to the empire. In the extreme south-east the new kingdom of Armenia-formed by the gathering of refugees from Armenia proper-for two centuries maintained its independence. Some of the wealthier fortified cities defended themselves for a while after the open country had become Turkish. Of these the most noted was Philadelpheia, whose brave citizens maintained themselves down to the year 1390. Here and there the Christian population survived in scattered districts, losing their own tongue and speaking only Turkish for the most part, in time coming to use it even for their church services. It is only of late years that the Greek language has once more penetrated into the interior, in the wake of the railways. Many of the original inhabitants managed to preserve their racial identity by externally conforming to Islam. At the present day there are various

sects in Asia Minor officially classed as Mohammedan, such as the Kizilbashes in the north-east, the Lycian Takhtajis and Bektashes, or the Ansariyeh in Cilicia, whose secret rites are thought to have preserved through the intervening centuries a dim tradition of their former Christian belief. Craniological investigations, too, indicate that a considerable proportion of the original inhabitants of Asia Minor survived the Turkish conquest, and non-Turkish types of heads are especially common among these various sects. The Anatolian Turk of to-day differs widely from his kinsfolk in Central Asia.

After the death of Alp Arslan in 1073 his son Malek Shah had entrusted the carrying out of the conquest of Asia Minor to his relative Suleiman, one of the greatgrandsons of Seljuk. Suleiman and his son, Kilij Arslan, were, to all intents and purposes, independent sovereigns, and founded the Seljuk sultanate of Rûm'-or Rome-for two centuries the central figure in the politics of Asia Minor. After a century spent in warfare against Byzantines and Crusaders, it seemed as if the Seljuks were about to establish permanently a powerful and civilised empire. Under Ala-ud-din Kai Kubad I. (1219-36) the empire attained its greatest splendour. It included all