THE FIRST PRINCE OF BULGARIA.
IT is difficult to conceive of a position better calculated to interest and employ an able politician than that to which Prince Alexander of Battenberg has just been elected. Scarcely a Prince—for though his mother was married to Prince Alex- ander of Hesse, it was by the morganatic formula, which con- veys no right of succession to the sovereignty—he has been raised by the people of Bulgaria to what, if not the most com- fortable, is certainly the most hopeful throne of the number which, under our own eyes, are growing up within the Balkan Peninsula. The Prince of Montenegro, though his Principality is the oldest and most national of them all, is ruler only of a mountain and a farm ; his army, splendidly brave though it be, can never be more than a guard ; and his chance of an ex- tension of dominion has now become very slight and remote. The Prince of Bosnia, if such a Sovereign ever exists—and we think the probabilities lie that way—will be an Austrian Arch- duke, and Austrian Archdukes have never been independent of the head of their House, or able to devise a policy of their own. The Prince of Servia sits upon a shaky throne, and one which, owing to Hungarian jealousy, can hardly expect any further accession of territory. The Prince of Roumania, although, if Austria ever breaks up, he might increase his dominion one-third, is fettered by the fact that his people are so separate in race, language, and social organisation from all the peoples around. He has room for 20,000,000 people, but as yet none of these races increase their numbers fast, except by accretion or immigration. The Roumanian evidently possesses qualities which before the late war were hardly attributed to him,—the power of organisa- tion, of endurance, of brave and steady fighting ; but he has not conciliated either the Slav, the Magyar, the Greek, or the Bulgarian, has, indeed, chiefly through the vices of a class of great landed proprietors, who have accepted all of Western civilisation except its restraints, earned among them an un- justified contempt. The King of Greece, hampered in part by the same difficulty, for his race, full as it is of capacities, seems not to impress Northerners, possesses none of the personal quali- ties which found empires, and what is as much to the pur- pose, is known not to possess them. His geographical position, too, though it may give him the islands, commerce, and possibly alliances, is not, in the political situation of the peninsula, par- ticularly fortunate. He is too liable to coercion from any Power with a Fleet. But Prince Alexander of Battenberg, only twenty-two years of age, with the eager ambition which a dubious birth developes, has become in a day the head of the central State of the whole Peninsula, the one with the best position for making alliances, and for organising the final attack upon the ultimate enemy of all, the Ottoman owners of Constantinople. If he is a strong man, able to win the confidence of the people he is set to govern, and to organise a people into an army without raising loans, as the Hohenzollerns twice in their history did, he may make of Bulgaria the Prussia of the Balkans. His people are brave, apt at drill, and willing to endure military service ; while the nucleus of an army, powerful for the State, has already been formed for him by the Russian administrators. The con- trol of the Balkans is virtually in his hands, for, as Reouf Pasha has shown, Turkey cannot pay for their occupation, and yet is so imperfectly his as to be a permanent reason in his subjects' eyes for strict and self-sacrificing discipline. Through those Passes may come any day an army of Asiatics, bent on devastation, and all the more tempted to invade, should Bul- garia become as prosperous as she hopes. Few as his subjects are, they are as numerous as those of the Great Elector, and if
he will but govern well, may be increased fifty per cent. by immigration within five years, Bulgaria attracting Russian pea- sants as no other spot will. Her soil is among the most fer- tile in the world, while her creed is the same as the Russian, and her language closely allied. Over the Passes two millions more of his own people, one in race, religion, and instinctive policy, just so far emancipated as never to feel safe, just so far organised as to see what the possession of the port on the lEgean, unjustly torn from them to give Lord Beaconsfield the appearance of a triumph, would imply to their future, will be per- petually stretching out their bands to him, and saying, " Come, rule us." Their sons will swell his ranks, their wealth will help his treasury, their restless and well-founded discontent will be his perpetual stimulus. And there, almost visible, to the south- ward, is to lie a perpetual menace, a Power which claims even now some vague rights over him, which regards him and his people as Infidel rebel.s, to be endured only while endurance is
imperative, and which, if it ever saw a fortunate chance, would hurl all Western Asia, Ottoman and Circassian and Arab, all the men who can fight, but can neither civilise nor pre- serve, upon his prosperous Provinces. There is no horror for civilised men like the dread of Asiatic invasion, and for Bul- garians it can never be absent while Turkey continues to exist. There is motive enough for any Prince, and there will speedily be means enough. Bulgaria itself is well organised and rich. Every Russian will be friendly to the Bulgarian. Every in- habitant of the peninsula will be anxious for a system of alliances which will make it self-sustaining, enable it to work out its own destiny, as Italy has done, independent alike of Vienna, Moscow, and Constantinople. Alexander I. ought in ten years to be able, for any attack on Turkey, to dispose of a quarter of a million of brave men, a fair fleet, and money sufficient for at least two campaigns, against an enemy not a hundred miles from his own border. Nor, if he can but find a fair 7nodus vivendi with Greece, will he be without active Western sympathy. Lord Beaconsfield cannot reign for ever, and to every other statesman west of the Vistula the single motive for tolerating the Sultan is the difficulty of replacing him by a Power strong enough and separate enough to be trusted with Constantinople ; and Bulgaria possessed of a hegemony in the Peninsula would be such a Power, strong enough even, if that gross injustice is to be perpetuated, to keep Russia out of her natural right of way to the waters of the world. The West has no interest in resisting such a change, if only it can trust the successor of the Sultan, and no inclination to prevent it, except for the sake of its interests. Leopold of Belgium, who, at all events, understood best of his generation the interests and the motives of the Courts which move armies, in his later years always regretted that he had refused Greece, for he would have died, be said, Emperor of Constantinople. Prince Alexander's chance, if only he has some of Leopold's powers, is a better one than his.
All that will be pronounced dreamy, but all that would have seemed equally dreamy as regards Prussia, which Russia and Austria in 1750 could invade more easily than Russians or Turks can now invade Bulgaria. There have been changes in the art of war which have given advantages to great States, but there have been none which give to Turkey or any State south of the Pruth unquestioned superiority over such a State as Bulgaria might become. An army of 70.000 brave men, thoroughly organised and made mobile, is still a very formid- able force—or Great Britain would be in a bad way— and especially when it occupies the centre of the posi- tion, and has a boundary so nearly perfect as that of Bul- garia now is. Of course, a Prince of Bulgaria must make alliances, as the earlier Hohenzollerns had also to do, Saxony being to them as Roumelia, Bavaria as Greece, and Sweden as Roumania ; but in presence of a common and powerful enemy, alliances between nations not divided by radical differences of civilisation or creed are not difficult to form. Already the Greeks and Bulgarians are finding terms of agreement in Macedonia, and the interests of the two races, though far from identical in the long-run, are identical through all that may remain of the period before Turkey has become a historic phrase. Of course, Prince Alexander may be quite incompetent to his situation, may be a King Otho, who con- ciliates no one, or a Prince Milan, who cannot use his fine material for an army ; but then he may also be a Prince Charles of Roumania, who, in complete silence, with little con- trol of money, and with a wretched set of self-seeking Ministers, was able so to organise his small force that it was fit to form a separate wing in any European army. If he is, he will have a career before him which will be worth watching, and at least an equal chance with any other competitor of acquiring the great open prize of modern history,—the throne of Constanti- nople, and the leadership of Eastern Europe from the Adriatic to the Black Sea.
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