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