When this project was made known at Constantinople, the person who most readily seized the full import of it was General Ignatieff, the Russian ambassador. It went directly counter to all the most cherished plans and projects of the Panslavic party, of which he was the moving spirit. There was nothing that he did not do to wreck the plan and upset the Pasha. Unfortunately the nature of an absolute government and the character of an Eastern autocrat afforded him ample means of action. The interference of a foreign ambassador in the internal economy of a province of the empire had nothing in it which appeared abnormal or impertinent; such interference was consecrated by long usage and had become chronic and accepted. Ignatieff began by representing to the sovereign that the spirit of the reforms effected by Midhat in his vilayet, especially the institution of local councils (which was of the very essence of the reforms introduced), were in direct opposition to the spirit of absolutism, and that the result would infallibly be that little by little the province itself would become detached from the body of the empire, and would claim its entire independence, as had already happened in the case of Egypt. It is not certain, however, that the ambassador would have gained his point, even with a sovereign so tenacious of his prerogatives as was Abdul Aziz, had not an unfortunate error of typography, eagerly seized on and exploited by Ignatieff, played into the hands of the ambassador. In a passage of the official journal of the province, the term “deputies” was inadvertently applied to the members of the chief council of the vilayet. This apparently trivial circumstance, the slip of a typographist, was sufficient to turn the scale in the Sultan’s mind and to wreck the project. Abdul Aziz refused his consent to the proposal, on the obviously insincere pretext of the expense connected with it. Thus this crowning act of Midhat’s work, the reform which above all others was calculated to attach the Bulgarians to the central government and to destroy a nest of disaffectation in the province, was defeated by a foreign ambassador playing on the ignorant susceptibilities and autocratic instincts of the sovereign of the country. If this were a single and exceptional example of the working of autocracy, it might be passed over in comparative silence, however regrettable it was in this particular instance; but the whole modern history of Turkey shows that such intervention was nothing less than a system of statecraft whereby autocracy was cunningly worked for the ruin of the country in as certain and deadly a way as was the _Liberum Veto_ of the Polish constitution. The spontaneous caprices and whims of an autocrat are the least part of the baneful effects of autocracy; it is in the shadows that flit behind the throne, stronger than the throne itself, working systematically on the ignorance and fears of the autocrat, with settled