It is not probable that the European Powers will allow any invasion of the country; but the Turks have always in hand the pretence of sending troops to occupy the Balkans, and this fact to some extent justifies the fears of the Bulgarians. If there were danger of another Russian invasion, the Turks would be fully justified in occupying the passes at once, and there is nothing in Eastern Roumelia to prevent or even delay such an occupation; but under present circumstances, when there is nothing to be feared from Russia--when peace and quiet is the thing of all others to be desired--the occupation of the Balkans would be a crime. AN EASTERN STATESMAN. CONTEMPORARY BOOKS. I.--HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF THE EAST. (_Under the Direction of_ Professor E. H. PALMER.) Colonel Malleson certainly did well to claim permission to rewrite Sir John Kaye's last volume (_History of the Indian Mutiny_, by Colonel Malleson, Vol. I., London: W. H. Allen & Co.), and comparison of the two may afford to the historian of the future valuable aid in interpreting the volumes yet to come. A great part of the present must be held to be the work of the virulent pamphleteer and violent partisan rather than of the historian; and if the quotations of, and references to, the Red Pamphlet indicate relations between Colonel Malleson and its author, the publishers cannot be held to have exercised a wise discretion in their choice. The task of the reviewer of such a book is unusually heavy. Book for book, almost chapter for chapter, it is intended to replace Sir John Kaye's work, and the reviewer therefore needs to study the two carefully, and to compare them minutely. Colonel Malleson, no doubt, had access to Sir John Kaye's materials, but within a certain field seems to have been unable to see the other side of any question. To arm, to leave Sepoys armed, is simply to detain European troops to watch them; it is nothing that to disarm them is to drive them, and all their connections, wild with terror as sheep marked for the slaughter; yet he cannot be ignorant of the cases in which a few bad men committed a regiment, and how whole regiments "went" in terror of their masters' vengeful distrust.[105] In saying, as he does so confidently, that by enrolling the Calcutta Volunteers on their first offer, on 20th May, Lord Canning would have set free half a European regiment, Colonel Malleson must have been thinking of what the Volunteers might have been fit to do had they been enrolled and drilled six months before,--provided they had been willing to take the day-work of garrison duty, and to think more of the State than of the house and furniture at Ballygunj: the real profit of the enrolment was the confidence and cheerfulness organization gave to the Europeans themselves. And--to take a more important instance--the "Gagging Act" was an insolent expression of distrust of Englishmen, an attempt to prevent their opinions reaching England _in print_. For