Almost exactly a thousand years after the death of Rurik, Russia’s victorious army was at San Stephano within sight of the domes and minarets of the City of Constantine. “At last,” shouted the jubilant soldiers, “we have reached our goal and Czargrad”--their name for Constantinople--“is ours!” Only a few hours more, they fondly believed, and they would see the Greek cross supplanting the Crescent at the dome of Santa Sophia and the dreams of ten centuries finally realized. But it was not to be. Russia had indeed advanced nearer the goal on which her eyes had been fixed for a thousand years, but the coveted prize, though seemingly so near, was yet far from her grasp. The Treaty of San Stephano had, it is true, established a dominant Slav state in the Balkans which it was intended should be but a simple dependency of Russia and a stepping stone to Constantinople, but the treaty was scarcely signed before England and others of the Great Powers insisted on its revision. This was done at the Congress of Berlin. Here Beaconsfield, in order “to check Russian influence in the Balkans” and to safeguard “the vital requirements of Britain’s Eastern policy,” insisted on the restoration of “the position of Turkey as a European state”--a position which had been practically lost by the treaty of San Stephano.[47] The Turk is still in Constantinople and is there notwithstanding the loud and reiterated declarations of statesmen from Gladstone to Lloyd George that he was to be cast “bag and baggage” out of Europe for evermore, but, when one remembers that, since the days of Solyman the Magnificent, the imminent downfall of Turkey as a European power has been confidently predicted scores of times; that, since the Osmanlis reached the Bosphorus nearly six centuries ago, no fewer than a hundred plans have been made for the partition of their territory[48] and that recently the English premier, Lloyd George, made the evacuation of Constantinople by Turkey an essential condition of peace--at least until he could have time to change his opportunist mind--one asks oneself how much longer the Sultan will successfully pursue his time-honored policy of _divide et impera_ and how much longer diplomats will continue to insist that the maintenance of the City of Constantine as the capital of the Ottoman Empire is a political necessity, and when, if ever, Russia’s persistent ambition of a thousand years will at last be realized.[49] From present indications there is little likelihood that the jealousies of the more powerful nations of Europe respecting the matchless capital of the Golden Horn will abate or that the traditional ability of Turkey’s astute rulers to play off the Great Powers one against the other will be less marked in the future than in the past.