once
under the dominion of the Ottoman empire, though almost all of them
are now independent of it. Nearly all of them lie in the region south
of the Danube, which is usually known as the Balkan Peninsula. Here
the complexities of race and religion are abundantly manifest, and
these archaic divisions of political society surround us everywhere.
This region has indeed been parcelled out, within our own time, into
territories of diverse States, but this is quite a modern formation,
and the idea of such political citizenship has been very recently
introduced.

If, now, it is asked why, in this corner of South-Eastern Europe, this
medley of internal distinctions, which was the prevailing
characteristic of the ancient world, has been so long preserved, the
answer is that all this country, the Balkan Peninsula, was under the
direct government of the Ottoman empire up to about seventy years ago,
and that most of the provinces were only liberated from the Turkish
yoke in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The effect of the
long dominion of the Turks over this country had been to perpetuate
the state of things which existed when they first conquered it. Their
policy, the policy of all Asiatic empires, was not to consolidate, or
to obliterate differences produced by race and religion, but to
maintain them in order to rule more securely. And here I may quote
from a book recently published under the title of _Turkey in Europe_,
which is unique of its kind, for in no other work can we find so
complete and particular a history of the Balkan lands, or so accurate
a description of the grouping of the people, taken from personal
knowledge and local investigation. The author, who calls himself
Odysseus, reminds us that the Ottoman Sultans acquired these
territories when they were in the confusion and dismemberment which
followed the decay and fall of the Byzantine empire; and he explains
that the Turks, who have been always inferior in number to the
aggregate of their Christian subjects, could hardly have kept up their
dominion if at any time the Christians had united against them. As the
Christians were not converted, religious unification, which in Asia
was the basis of Mohammedan power, was here impossible, so the Turks
divided that they might rule. 'The Turks have thoroughly learned,' he
says, 'and daily put into practice with admirable skill, the lesson
of _divide et impera_, and hence they have always done, and still do,