The deadlock between the Porte and the Powers over the
financial control of Macedonia continues. The Financial Agents, whom the Porte stubbornly refuses to recognise, have now arrived at Salonika, and will, it is said, having formed themselves, with the Civil Agents of Austria and Russia, into a Board of Financial Control, summon Mimi Pasha, the Turkish Inspector-General, to take the chair. As the Porte will not authorise Hilmi to accept this invitation, his refusal will leave the Powers no alternative between abandoning their scheme or coercing the Porte. As the Times correspondent at Constantinople puts it, the Powers have committed them- selves too deeply for them to turn back without complete loss of prestige; but, unfortunately, none of them is anxious to take the initiative, and of the six Governments concerned only two—England and Italy—are in reality anxious to see the scheme of international financial control rendered effective. If this view be correct, as there is unfortunately good reason to believe, the breakdown of the scheme and the recrudescence of disorder are ,inevitable. The international gendarmerie have at best only proved partially efficient in controlling the Turks. Thus within the last few days Mr. Noel Buxton, M.P., has reported a massacre of villagers at Konopnitsa, in the district of one of the Austrian gendarmerie officers, and not far from Uskub, their headquarters.
The German Press has reproduced this week from the Hanseatic Press Bureau an extraordinary tale of a Boer plot to join the native rebels and seize German South-West Africa. A certain Andries De Wet, a nephew of General De Wet, is
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