This sentence, spoken on January 9, 1853, by Nicholas, Czar of Russia, to the British Minister at St. Petersburg, Sir George Hamilton Seymour, supplied a phrase which has become historic, and remains as appropriate to the present state of Turkey-in-Europe as it was forty-four years ago. The Ottoman Empire in Europe had become an anachronism, not because it was a heritage won by mediæval conquest, for that may be assigned as the origin of almost every European State, but because the Turk maintained his rule in modern times by mediæval methods. In the days when nations were kept in subjection by the violence of their governors, the Turk had been a standing menace to all Europe, for he was as powerful as any Christian Monarch; but in proportion as the other nationalities acquired the solidarity which follows on the growth of constitutional rights and the limitation of absolute rule, he became a terror only to the subject races within the Ottoman dominions. To the rising tide of Western civilisation he opposed the breastwork of philosophic indifference, though the ancient Saracen instinct for war still caused him to adopt eagerly the successive inventions in military armament. The weakest principality had nothing to fear in the nineteenth century from Turkish invasion, but the most powerful states had realised that it would be a formidable task to make the Porte comply with the concert of Europe--such is the quality of genuine _vis inertiæ_. Nevertheless the real guarantee for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had come to be--not her army and fleet, nor the fervour of her Moslem subjects--but the mutual jealousy and suspicion existing between other Powers regarding the disposal of Ottoman territory. It had come to this, then, that the Christian states acquiesced in the continuance of the Ottoman Empire in Europe as a kind of buffer state--a barrier against such a collision of interests and ambitions as might revive warfare on a Napoleonic scale. The heirs of the "sick man" dreaded his death because of the conflict sure to ensue among his heirs. [Illustration: _C. J. Staniland, R.I._} THE LARGEST GUN OF 1837. The illustration shows a gun's crew working the 67-cwt. gun, which was the largest in use in the early part of Her Majesty's reign. It threw a solid shot of 68 lbs. weight. At the Rotunda at Woolwich there is a gun of this size which was used in the trenches at Sebastopol, and had its trunnions shot away.]