The needs of the country, when Ferdinand accepted the throne, were many and essential. Roads and railways had to be built to develop the nascent agricultural industry which has been the mainstay of Bulgarian national life. The work was taken in hand by Stambuloff, whose plans for the progress of the country, even more than his foreign policy, reveal him as the statesman that his admirers have always proclaimed him. His policy of internal development entailed heavy taxation, under which the country groaned, and which earned him, more than anything else, the title of Tyrant, which Ferdinand thrust upon him. With his fall the policy of internal development was brought to a standstill, but the taxation continued. Ferdinand employed much of the money in the creation of a capital city worthy of such a Prince and such a Court. He set about the creation of a new Sofia, taking as his motto “Expense is no object.” A modern city was run up with a celerity and elaboration that reminded visitors of the creation of Johannesburg. M. Alexandre Hepp, the enthusiastic French biographer of Ferdinand, almost exhausts his enthusiasm in recounting the marvels of this recreation of an old city. “It seems like a new city imposed upon one already renewed,” he writes. “Every time I visit it I find something added—a monument, a museum, a park, a government office, a bank, an hotel, a factory, a theatre, or a school. New boulevards and streets, wide, well-paved, planted with trees, lined with kiosques, cross and re-cross. Lions and eagles ornament the new bridges. Electricity flares, the tramcars roar, motor-cars dash about. Near the statue to the Czar Liberator, designed by Zocchi, rears the finished structure of the great cathedral Newski, built at a cost of £1,000,000 raised by public subscription. Great markets are rising from their foundations.” And so on. All this work was done under the personal supervision of Ferdinand himself. “Behind a corner window of the palace,” writes Mr. John Macdonald, who has produced an English biography of Czar Ferdinand, which only falls short in enthusiasm of the ecstasies of M. Hepp, “overlooking the highway, is the Czar’s private study, where he often works till the first hour or two of the morning. Piles of street plans, of monumental drawings, of designs for the splendid park and gardens, with their new palace, have been examined behind that corner window.” The sophistication of the Bulgarians having been begun by the creation of this fine city in the midst of the gloomy plains of Bulgaria, Ferdinand continued it by the creation of a powerful military caste.