The true facts should not be blinked. With regard to Turkey in Europe they are both racial, political, and ecclesiastical. The race aspect was powerful with Disraeli. He always believed it to be “the key of history, and the surest clue to the characters of men in all ages.” In England he discerned the blend of “Saxon industry and Norman manners.” While it was race again that had made national institutions “the ramparts of the multitude against large estates exercising political power derived from a limited class.” Practically, it is still a question of the Slav against both Greeks (whom they have murdered) and Albanians, who themselves massacre the Serbs. Politically, it is a question of Russian influence and both Austrian and Italian jealousy. Ecclesiastically, it is a question of the freed principalities against the Patriarch of Constantinople; who, since the very time when Russia first newly pretended to the Byzantine inheritance of the Greeks, became (oddly enough) a nominee of the Sultan. From the outset Disraeli determined to undo that larger Bulgaria, stretching to the Ægean, involving all the international conflicts just hinted, and ranging from the Danube to Salonica, which Russia proposed by the clandestine Treaty of San Stefano. As is familiar, he founded a smaller Bulgaria, barriered by the Balkans, dividing it into two portions--Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia--in the last of which he implanted autonomy. It has often been said that the sequel proved him futile, for the two slices of the big worm have since been repieced. But the events of 1885-86 which caused this reunion were the gift, not of Russian ascendency, but of those very institutions which Disraeli created. Again, it has been popularly put as if the treaty were not his own policy and had not endured. I could most easily prove the error of both these propositions. As regards the first, just as in the Reform Bill of 1867, the co-operation of both parties was necessary for the limited achievement of his views, so it fared with the need for European concert in the Berlin Treaty. But his ideas had been sketched out during the Crimean War, and the restoration of that very concert, which still subsists, was a birth of the treaty. The Berlin Treaty restored not only British prestige, but--as a foreign statesman remarked--Britain’s moral influence in the councils of Europe. It was so hailed in England, and this, as Mr. Roebuck acknowledged, was its ground for enthusiastic national support. Russia withdrew from Constantinople. Both the Dardanelles and the Turkish frontier in Europe were assured. A Sultan, then beset with bankruptcy and dynastic troubles, was given his chance of heading a party of reform championed by Midhat. Turkey was rendered compact, and lopped of mongrel provinces, while she obtained the port of Burgos on the Black Sea as a check to Russia. As regards Turkey in Asia, Disraeli’s aim, as I have already outlined, was Indian. Erzeroum, Bayazid, Alashkerd,