Is there any need to elaborate the sordid treachery of his conduct? As a bachelor Prince his life was not worth a day’s purchase at any time. In order that he might marry, Stambuloff had the Constitution amended, thereby earning an unpopularity with the Church party which contributed largely to his fall. He had already made himself detested by the army because of the severity with which he crushed out the plots against the life of his ungrateful Prince. The services he had rendered to Ferdinand were made the weapons of his undoing. Dismissed, impoverished and persecuted with the vilest charges, Stambuloff was imprisoned in Sofia until such time as his murder could be contrived. And while his minister’s unavenged blood was yet warm this monster of ingratitude was concluding with the dead man’s enemies a pact in which blasphemy and treachery played equal parts. For the patronage of Russia he caused a child of three to become an apostate from the faith in which he had been baptized, and broke the heart of his gentle Princess. That he lived to betray the friendship for which he paid such an infamous price will be made abundantly clear. In the meantime Bulgaria’s lip service to Russia is worth considering. “We find Russian graves scattered all over our country,” wrote the _Mir_ at the time of Stambuloff’s fall. “The men who rest in them shed their blood for us. But where are the English, Italian, Austrian, German graves?” When Ferdinand entered Bulgaria and was received in Sofia, the Metropolitan Bishop reminded him of the national debt, after a few words of personal welcome, saying, “This people is grateful to Russia, who made immense sacrifices for our deliverance, and to whom we owe our liberty and independence. Do not then forget these sacrifices, and use your best efforts to re-establish relations between Russia and Bulgaria—to reconcile the Liberator and the liberated.” A quarter of a century later the _Mir_ was writing: “The healthiest minds among the Bulgarian people, realizing that they were freed by Russia in the name of the same idea which at this moment is creating a great Slav Empire, are conscious of the existence of a bond of blood, but are unable to act in accordance with it.” They were unable, because Ferdinand had made it impossible. How he had done this is explained by M. Buroff, once a minister and a leading Bulgarian publicist. In the _Almanac of the National Party_, for 1915, he explains that the Court gave strong support to all opposition to Russia. All other views lead their holders to persecution and dismissal. In the Army “the higher the rank held by an officer, the more dependent he is upon his expressed hatred of Russia. It is the means by which officers may secure the dignity of generalship. It is from the Court that this poison spreads as if by some mysterious agency.”