BOSNIA AND THE HERZEGOVINA.* I. YRIAMTE'S book, the successive chapters

of which first appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, deserves to be heartily recom- mended to the English public, even after the appearance of Mr.

vans's adpaim.ble work. Mr. Sutherland Edwards has made considerable use of it in his pamphlet on the Slavonian Provinces of Turkey, and indeed, the singularly impartial tone of the author, no less than the apparent accuracy of his information and the clearness of his exposition, cannot fail to win the reader's con- fidence. We have only to complain that the alternative title is a misnomer, for but a small portion of the book is occupied with travels in the disturbed provinces.

After a prelitniaary sketch of the geography and history of Bosnia and the Herzegovina, M. Yriarte describes the routes by which he has entered those provinces. In 1874, he started from Trieste, and penetrated by way of Zara across Dalmatia and the mountains into the Herzegovina, where he speedily learnt that he was on Turkish soil, by the " blows that fell thick as hail on the backs of the Rayahs who obstructed the passage of the zaptiehs." But the following year this passage was closed. He therefore tpok the train to Agram, one of the chief seats of the Omladina, of which he gives some valuable details, thence passed on to Siszek, and so to Kostainicza. At this point he crossed the river to the Turkish side, but after a brief promenade through the Turkish town, and the sight of the heads of two rayahs nailed up to a karatda, or observatory, he found it prudent to avail him- self of an " invitation " to return to the Austrian bank. Hence he drove along the Unna to Dvor, falling in on the way with a band of refugees who were just passing over, under the fire of Bashi-Bazouks, from Turkish to Austrian soil. Among the people of the Austrian frontier he found " two clearly defined currents,— an ardent desire for fighting on the part of the male population, a terror that knows no bounds on the part of the feminine popu- lation." The whole country, he assures us, openly showed its sympathy with the insurgents, and the officers were as ardent as any in the cause of thg Bosniac Slays. Here, too, he found suggestive proofs of the want of cohesion between the various nationalities that compose the Austrian Empire, even between those which are not notoriously antagonistic, like the Magyar and the Slav :—

" From the banks of the Danube to the Adriatic, from Sandhi to Quarnero, and from Zara to Cattaro, I have been struck to see with what difficulty the Austrian officer resigns himself to live in the midst a the Slav populations, and how little he teaches them, by example, to exert their hagennity for procuring a relative well-being In such and such a point of this vast State, the soldier considers him- self as a foreigner, whom chance or the caprice of a supreme chief has placed in garrison in a hospitable land. At Knin, at a thousand feat above the soil, or at Cattaro, on the first summit of the Black Moun- tain, backed by the bastions of old Turkish or Venetian fortresses, in the midst of simple, ignorant, and superstitions populations, who do not understand their language or profess the same religion as themselves, the officers, always gentle, always good-natured, and faithful to their duties as soldiers, have yet appeared to me to accept with difficulty what they considered as an exile, to the end of which they were looking forward. ' What am I doing here among the Turks ?' I was asked at Kostainicze, by a young serjeant of infantry, born at Proelucca, on the coast of the (lug of Quarnero."

It is the Nemesis of empire.

After a short sojourn at Dvor, M. Yriarte, amid the gloomiest presages from the Austrian peasants—who brought him a comrade with his neck tattooed by Bashi-Bazouks, as a punishment for the crime of crossing the river in search of a cow—was ferried across the Unna, reached the railway station of Novi, and took the train for Bajnaluka, which only ran on alternate days. A sketch of the attempt of the Turks to unite their territory to the rest of. Europe, and to connect its several parts with one another by a network of railways, explains the existence of this curious little line, so apparently purposeless and belated in an out-of-the-way

corner of Bosnia. The description of the journey is worth quoting We roll on thus for four hours, crossing a beautiful plain, watered by numerous streams; the country, rich but ill-cultivated, is just un- dulating enough to prevent the view from being monotonous. All the crops are still standing, and the fields seem deserted. The Servian, we

* Bank et Hers■fgovine 801408141 de Voyage pendant 'insurrection. Par Charles Xriarta. Parts : Pion. Travers THerzegorine. Par A. Meylan. Paris: Sandoz at Fischbacher. know, has a horror of agglomerations, and the houses are scattered bore and there, at great distances from one another. Whole forests fired as they stand show tho skeletons of their burnt trunks and their great bleak branches ; the soil that they once shaded, bare, covered with ashes, forms a contrast with this smiling, soft, harmonious nature, with its fair and bright colouring, which recalls Touraine in the first days of autumn. The abandonment and the neglect of the vegetable wealth strike the traveller ; at each step, there are trees felled and left on the ground ; almost all the earth is fallow ; round a few houses, grouped near a paltry mosque with a wooden minaret, stretch fields of maize and of millet, where the plants are withering on the stalk ; the pumpkins and ripe gourds enamel the ground with points of yellow and bright red."

From Bajnaluka, where a reign of terror prevailed among the real- nant of the Christian population, M. Yriarte accompanied a Turkish detachment to Sviniar, in the extreme north-west of Bosnia, and witnessed an engagement between them and the insurgents ; then he returned to Bajnaluka, and after spending a fortnight there, disappeared, for aught we can tell, into space, for he gives us no further record whatever of his travels. But he gives us what is perhaps quite as valuable, a series of admirable chapters on various points a knowledge of which is indispensable for an in- telligent view of the Eastern Question in general, and cif the difficulty in Bosnia and the Herzegovina in particular. We have first a chapter on the army, which would be, he thinks, equal to the best in Europe, if only the character and intellectual training of its officers corresponded in some degree to the excellent physique and high morale of the common soldiers. His estimate is fully borne out by M. Meylan, who says that "the Turkish officers are, with few exceptions, aluggish and indolent ; esprit de corps is unknown ; they are actuated solely by fanaticism and a sense of duty ;"acta of heroism are rare," since " the social organi- sation of the Turkish family stifles all personal sentiment of bravery." The next chapter speaks of the position of the Barth and the taxation exacted of him, and reads like an expansion of Mr. MacColfs article in the Contemporary for November last. X Yriarte's general conclusion is that the insurrection follows on the grievous wrongs inflicted by the Turkish Government on the Rayah, as cause follows effect :-

" It would be puerile to deny that those who regard matters from a loftier stand-point than the poor*, Rayah have pushed him forward, and have worked on his misery in favour of the great idea;' but if you cast your eye over the imposts exacted of the Bosnian tillers of the soil, you will easily bring yourself to see in the majority of the soldiers of the insurrection a Christian labourer, who, reduced to die ou a fertile soil by reason of the greed of the poasessor, prefers to fall as it man, the champion of a lawful rebellion, to which his religious banner serves as a flag, and the head of which is his own pastor."

The author is of opinion, like Mr. Evans and most other authorities, that the Rayah has no alternative but insurrection or death, since, bad as the fiscal system is, it is rendered absolutely intolerable by the mode in which it is administered.

After a chapter on the law courts, in which the author admits that the popular Servian proverb, " For the Christian no justice," is not far from the truth, we come to perhaps the most interesting in the volume, that on liberty of worship. It should never be forgotten that, theoretically at least, Islamism is in some respects the most liberal of creeds. The following is a translation of the Hatname (partly quoted by Mr. Evans) regulating the status of the Catholic subjects of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dated 1463. The original is preserved in the convent of Foinica, in Bosnia:— "We, Sultan Mehemet Khan, make known to all, noble and ignoble : I have granted this firman to the Franciscan priests of Bosnia, and I have given it unto them by a special token of my glace. I order that no man cause any let or hindrance, either to their churches qr themselves, or molest them in anything; and I will that in all itlY States and my possessions they have nothing to fear or to dread. Those who have fled and who have returned shall not be disturbed ; let them be exempt from prosecutions in my provinces, and let them be allowed to serve their churches there To confirm this graqe and this most high protection granted to the prieats aforesaid, I give them this order, and I swear by a most solemn oath, in the name of the Creator of heaven and earth, in the name of the Seven Sacred Books, in the name of our great Prophet, in the name of the hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets, in the name of the holy sword with which I am girt. Let no man torment in anything whatsoever the said priests, or oppose them, so long as they are faithful to tpy person and to my representatives."

Yet in spite of this and many subsequent charters of religious freedom, culminating in the famous liatti-sherrif read by Beehid Pasha in the plain of Gulkhane in 1839, Count Andrassy was, according to all observers, fully justified in the statement in his Note that " there is, perhaps, no district of Turkey in Europe where the antagonism between the Cross and the Crescent assumes such bitter forms." M. Yriarte attributes this virulence of thereli- gious difficulty in Bosnia to various causes. The sight of men of the same blood living in peace and prosperity across the Unna and the Save ; the proneness of Slav populations, whatever be the

creed they profess, to religious fanaticism ; the hereditary feud of centuries between the Rayah and the owners of the soil, who at the Mussulman conquest became renegades from the Christian faith and lords of their former brethren ; the animosity, so skil- fully played upon by the Turk, bet ween the Greek and Catholic rites,—such are a few, and only a few, of the causes which he alleges. The whole conveys a most formidable impression of the difficulties in the way of establishing a just and stable government in Bosnia. It should be noted that in the Herzegovina the Catholics have joined the Greeks in insurrection, while in Bosnia our author saw the Catholics marching with the Turkish army against the insurgent members of the Greek rite.

The final chapter contains a brief history of the insurrection and its main incidents, with sketches of the principal insurgent chiefs, and of the scene of operations. The author's moderation is conspicuously shown in its concluding words :—

"There exists a formidable incompatibility between the Servians and the Turks, as we hope we have shown, by going back to the very sources of the domination, to the origin of the conflict. The attitude of England has certainly postponed the solution; it has settled nothing, and if diplomacy leaves face to face on the same territory the Christians and Mahommedans under the conditions in which they have subsisted since the conquest, it will have prepared for Europe the most bloody future."

Events have " marched " fast and far in the brief interval since these words were written, and diplomacy has marched with them ; but still the war-cloud is hovering over Europe, and almost at any hour it may be the cannon's turn to speak.

M. Meylan's amusing little book is the result of a visit, in the capacity of a newspaper correspondent, to Montenegro and the insurgent camp before Nicsics—the scene of so much bloodshed both before and since—in the spring of last year. He was pre- sent at a series of actions, ending in the partial relief of Nicsics by Mukhtar Pasha, and his disastrous retreat, and he abounds in spirited anecdotes of his often perilous and occasionally droll adventures, in company with the warlike and valiant correspondent

of the Russia Mir. M. Meylan's view of the causes of the Eastern trouble differs little from M. Yriarte's :— " These men, who fight, fall, and die, defending neither a king, nor an idea, nor a system, have risen in a day of exasperation against those who treat them as mere cattle; they ask, in short, after ages of oppres- sion, for a little of that liberty which is abused elsewhere ; they ask for peace in their labour, tranquillity in their home. What matter to them the great Sultan or the three Emperors ? What they wish is to culti- vate the ungrateful soil, scanty as it is, of their solitudes, to worship their own God,—in a word, to labour and pray in peace. To that the reply they get is,—'peace of Europe' and 'reforms,' European equi- librium' and armistice,'—things that they do not understand, and never will understand, for so long as the sun in his regular course lights up the Balkan Mountains with his rays, the Turk will prey upon the Christian, and the Christian will hate the Turk."

A "formidable incompatibility," truly, and one that a dozen paper constitutions and a hundred protocols will never conjure away. But before we know the remedy we must know the disease, and to that knowledge each of the books before us is, in its own way, a distinct contribution.