“To-day weapons and ambuscades are things of the romantic past. Twelve years have sufficed, under M. de Kallay’s administration, not only to remove all traces of the wild, inhospitable, inaccessible Bosnia of which I have been speaking, but indeed and especially to banish even the memory of those dark days of strenuous battle, and to wipe away from the hearts of both invader and invaded all traces of the hate which then animated them. In the year 1882, the superior administration of the two provinces (Bosnia and Herzegovina) passed into the hands of the Minister of Finance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who was then, and who is still, M. de Kallay. From this moment all is changed. The powers given to the new administration are almost unlimited. The civil element has been substituted for the military element, and pacification has succeeded conquest. The greatest effort is made to reassure all minds. Not a single minaret has disappeared, not a _muezzin_ is deprived of his resources.” A recent writer wisely says that “the Armenian question, if it ever be settled at all, must be taken out of the Turk’s hands, whether he like it or not.... And we have an opportunity now, which may never come our way again, of settling a difficulty which, if allowed to develop much longer, will prove more fruitful of mischief than any with which we have been confronted for a generation or more.”[26] [Illustration: TURKISH SOLDIER, “REGULAR.” ] C. B. Norman, special correspondent of _The London Times_, in his _Armenia and the Campaign of 1877_[27] wrote words which are even truer to-day. I condense: “Naturally, since I have been here I have had many, very many, opportunities of conversing with Turkish officers and men on the so-called Eastern Question; and the consequence is that, arriving in the country a strong philo-Turk, deeply impressed with the necessity of preserving the ‘integrity of the Empire’ in order to uphold ‘British interests,’ I now fain would cry with Mr. Freeman: ‘Perish, British interests, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike a blow on behalf of the wrong against the right!’[28] “There is no finer race in the world than the Turk proper. Brave, honest, industrious, truthful, frugal, kind-hearted, and hospitable, all who _know_ the Osmanli speak well of him. He is as much oppressed by the curse of misgovernment as his Christian fellow-subject; and had the members of the Eastern Question Association as keen a sense of justice as they have love of writing, they would long ago have obliterated the word ‘Christian’ from their lengthy documents, and striven to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders of the subjects of the Porte, downtrodden as they are by an effete section of the Mohammedan race, who have degenerated in mind, body, and estate, since coming in contact with Western civilization.