The natural destiny of the Turks in Europe, like that of ruling castes everywhere when holding in subjection a population greatly more numerous than themselves, is either to gradually relax their sway and share the government with the subject races, as the Normans in England did,—or, if obstinately maintaining their class-despotism, to be violently deposed from the supremacy. The increasing development of the Greek and other sections of the population of European Turkey has of late years made one or other of these alternatives imminent; but the extensive reforms and liberalisation of the government simultaneously undertaken by the Ottoman rulers, and the remarkable abeyance in which they have begun to place the _distinctive_ tenets of the Mahommedan faith, promised, if unthwarted by foreign influences, to keep the various races in amity, and admit Christians to offices in the state. The history of the last fifteen years has shown this system of governmental relaxation growing gradually stronger—so that Lord Palmerston was justified in saying that no country in the world could show so many reforms accomplished in so short a time as Turkey. And after the recent exploits of the Ottomans in defeating simultaneously the attacks of Russia and of the Greek and Montenegrin insurgents, and the Turkish predilections even of those provinces which were entered by the Christian forces of the Czar, it cannot be doubted that the Turkish rule was on the whole giving satisfaction, and that, if unaided by foreign Powers, no insurrection against the supremacy of the bold-hearted Osmanlis had the slightest chance of success. It was this state of matters which alarmed the ambitious Czar into his present aggression; for he felt that now or never was the time to interfere, if he did not wish to see a Turko-Greek state establish itself in such strength as to bid defiance to his power. We may add, that, whatever be the issue of the present contest, it must tend to a further and higher development of the Turkish character. The contagion of Western ideas, disseminated in the most imposing of ways by the presence of the armies of England and France, cannot fail to impress itself on the slumbrous but awakening Ottomans, and not only expand their stereotyped civilisation into a wider and freer form, but possibly to strike also from their religion the more faulty and obstructive of its tenets.