THE PASSING OF THE NEAR EAST.
[To TEN Earroa 07 7111 "SIMMAT011."1 SIR,—The fiat of the Great Powers is as the laws of the Medes and Persians—in theory immutable, in practice the puppet of circumstance. In the present instance it has found its Daniel in the Balkan quartet, and the status quo ante has heard its
death-knell. The first symptom comes from the Teutonic, group. The Slav Confederacy for the moment is in the ascendant, pressing on gallantly for the old capital of the Greek Empire, which was torn from Christendom by the Turk in 1453 amid the un-Christian dissensions, political and religious, which then paralyzed Europe.
The Greece of to-day is the little kingdom rescued some eighty years ago from Turkish misrule by the then Triple Entente, England, France, and Russia, at the battle of Navarino. Would it be surprising if the Triple Entente of 1912 were to complete the work of her forerunner, and, if not transfer the throne of Greece from Athens to Constantinople, at all events bring under its sovereignty their kith and kin of Macedonia P The King of Greece is a scion of that Royal House of Denmark which the Teutonic group, represented by Prussia and Austria, despoiled so pitilessly in 1864. Reparation for that wrong may not now be made with a contrite heart, or even with a spontaneous grace, but solely at the dictation of Nemesis, the hand of fate having proved too strong for the ambitions of the Germania League. Close on fifty years ago the King of Prussia, backed by Austria, took from Denmark the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein to make a waterway from the Baltic to the North Sea. It would be but justice if the grandson of that king and his Imperial brother of Austria were to install the Dane-born King of Greece as guardian of the waterway betwixt the Enxine and the .2Egean. If no Norman ever eat on the throne of Constantinople in the Middle Ages, it was not that the will was wanting. The conquerors of Sicily and Calabria would as lief have ruled at the Golden Horn, and indeed they doubt- less played their part in the Latin Empire. In the tenth century the Norman seized his principality in the teeth of Europe; in the twentieth Europe nominates him to the vacancy.
For the moment the Balkan Peninsula is the cockpit of Europe, in which the giant Turk is pitted against the Balkan Lilliputs. The Teuton backs the first, and the Slav the second. A German marshal trained the Turk, and Krupp armed him. The Lilliputs trained themselves, and Creusot armed them. There is food for reflection here; for the Lilliputs are worsting
the giant at every point.—I am, Sir, &c., A. O. TATE. The Athenaeum.
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