But though Serajevo herself has degenerated into the _chef-lieu_ of a ‘circle’—though an alien bureaucracy has succeeded the patriarchal sway of her own landowners and merchants—though Giaour-Sultans and ‘New Turks’ from Stamboul—those muck-rakes of mendicant statecraft who filch their political tinsel from the gutters of the boulevards!—have replaced her native Agas and elders by an Osmanlì ‘_Préfet_,’ with the same apish levity with which these same gentry toss aside the jewelled amber of their forefathers for a Parisian cigarette!—nevertheless, despite of all these tinkering experiments in centralization of which they have been made the _corpus vile_, the citizens of this old stronghold of provincial liberties have only clung with warmer attachment to the ‘true green’ of Bosnian Toryism. Only what they can no longer practise in politics they parade in religion, and Serajevo remains more than ever the focus of the Mahometan fanaticism of Bosnia. This was the danger of the present moment, and gave but too valid grounds for the wide-spread apprehension among the Bosnian rayahs that the outbreak of the revolt might provoke the bigots of the capital to a general massacre of the Christian minority there; and that the Damascus of the North might, as she had already threatened a year or two ago on a less provocation, reproduce the bloody scenes which have made her Syrian namesake a word of terror to the Christians of Turkey. This is what happened here only three years ago, as we heard the story from those who played a distinguished part in averting the impending catastrophe; nor can anything give a better idea of the dangerous spirit abroad among the Moslem population of Serajevo.