There is, we fear, trouble coming, or come, in the
Balkans. The Bulgarians have been holding a grand celebration of the struggle of 1877 in the Shipka Pass, and the revolutionary leaders of Macedonia have thought the occasion a good one for exchanging their protests against Turkish misgovernment into an active movement against the Pashas. They have called out three thousand of their followers, have defeated some Turkish detachments, and propose to maintain a guerilla war through the winter. The Sultan is so alarmed that he has called out thirty thousand Reserves at Monastir and Salonika, and we shall doubtless soon hear that the insur- gents have been slaughtered. We have endeavoured elsewhere to point out the real and extreme danger latent in the move- ment, and the only permanent preventive ; but the jealousy of the Great Powers as regards any change in European Turkey seems to increase rather than diminish. They could prevent all risings by declaring Macedonia a tributary principality, but they are uncertain to which side the newly liberated State would lean. Each wishes to claim gratitude as the deliverer, and so there is no deliverance.
Previous page
