TILE TURK AND HIS LOST PROVINCES.
The Turk and his Lost Provinces. By W. E. Curtis. (F. H. Revell and Co. 7s. 6d. net.)—Mr. Curtis has given us here some very readable chapters about the Turk in general, about the Sultan in particular, about the States which Europe has, so to speak, set up in business within the last half-century, and about the relations between them. It is a greatly entangled affair; there are diversities of interest and policy, some not easily soluble personal equations, all seen through a thick mist of falsehood and ignorance. Part I., occupying nearly half the volume, is given to "The Great Turk and his Capital," and this is the most interesting section, though there are some noteworthy things in Part II., wherein Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Greece are suc- cessively described. The personality of Abd-ul-Hamid is a picturesque subject ; so is his Treasury, not an uninteresting place where riches are represented by paper, but a place of actually visible treasures, gold and jewels. In Part II. Mr. Curtis has some curious things to tell us about the abduction of Miss Stone. Of course the business of carrying off and holding to ransom is a recognised way of earning a livelihood in these regions. Mr. Curtis gives a list of nineteen persons who have been so dealt with since 1880. The total amount realised was between £60,000 and £70,000, the Miss Stone business, by which .213,000 was realised, being the most profitable. Mr. Curtis, how- ever, is inclined to think that it was not an affair of genuine brigandage, but a device of the Macedonian Committee to bring things to a crisis. One reason that he gives is that the captors behaved better to their prisoners than Turks would have done ; another—and this is a curious bit of etiquette—that when there are real brigands in the case, each member of the band gives the ransomed man a present of money—out of what has just been paid for him. These gentlemen were so deplorably ignorant of good manners that they gave nothing.
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