THE REPETITIONS OF HISTORY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Just a hundred years ago the town of Cattaro was blockaded by a British fleet and besieged by a Montenegrin army. History is repeating itself to-day. On the former occasion the enemy was French, and their garrison in Cattaro surrendered to the British naval commander to save them- selves from the fury of the Montenegrins. The crushing defeats which the Austrian army has undergone at the hands of Servians and Russians may be accounted for by the fact that one-third of its soldiers are Slave and their sympathies are with their opponents, for the war is really and mainly a struggle for mastery between the Slavonic and the Teutonic races in Eastern Europe. Lemberg, now the capital of Austrian Poland, which has just been captured by Russians, was taken by the Turks little more than two hundred years ago. It is the most northerly point to which a Turkish army ever penetrated in Europe during their invasions of Poland in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At that time Eastern Hungary was a province of the Ottoman Empire, and a Turkish Pasha of three horse- tails ruled in Buda.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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