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is a tremendously comfortable affair, and the crudity of the sarcasm that I frequently heard levelled by its fortunate members at the victims of the fashionable Turk was such as to produce a good deal of resentful meditation. It was provoking to hear a rosy English gentleman, who had just been into Leicestershire for a week's hunting, deliver the opinion that the vulgar Bulgarians had really not been massacred half enough; and this in spite of the fact that one had long since made the observation that for a good plain absence of mawkish sentimentality a certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched. On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the measureless misery in which these interesting populations were actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate invasion of a country which professed the strongest desire to live in peace with its invaders was at least a rather striking anomaly. Such a course could only be justified by the most gratifying results, and brilliant consequences as yet had not begun to bloom upon the blood-drenched fields of Bulgaria. To see this heavy-burdened, slow-moving Old England making up her mind was an edifying spectacle. It was not over-fanciful to say to one's self, in spite of the difficulties of the problem and the (in a certain sense) evenly-balanced scales, that this was a great crisis in her history, that she stood at the crossing of the ways, and that according as she put forth her right hand or her left would her greatness stand or wane. It was possible to imagine that in her huge, dim, collective consciousness she felt an oppressive sense of moral responsibility, that she too murmured to herself that she was on trial, and that, through the mists of bewilderment and the tumult of party cries, she begged to be enlightened. The sympathetic American to whom I have alluded may be represented at such an hour as making a hundred irresponsible reflections and indulging in all sorts of fantastic visions. If I had not already wandered so far from my theme, I should like to offer a few instances here. Very often it seemed natural to care very little whether England went to war with Russia or not: the interest lay in the moral struggle that was going on within her own limits. Awkward as this moral struggle made her appear, perilously as it seemed to have exposed her to the sarcasm of some of her neighbors--of that compact, cohesive France, for inst
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