of the new order of things will be imperilled. If English interests are to be considered in the matter, they clearly point to England's supporting such a policy. By all means let the Slaves be delivered from Turkish misrule, but no less deliverance should be given to the Greeks. If the former have found a friend in Russia, the latter should find one in England. But to leave Greece confined to her present miserable limits would be equally unwise and unjust. To do so would merely be laying up a cause of certain discontent and difficulty for the future. The exact limits of those territorial changes must be left to the care of a European congress. Difficult though the task may be, it does not offer any insuperable obstacles. It requires chiefly to be directed by a spirit of justice, an honest determination to reconstruct south-eastern Europe with a special view to the well-being and contentment of its various creeds and races.

14. The regulations concerning the Straits of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus are of European importance. It is satisfactory to know that they are admitted to be so on all hands, and must therefore be determined by general agreement. It may be desirable to maintain these regulations as they now stand; but not a little is to be said in favor of allowing the vessels of all nations- ships of war or merchantmen-to pass through the Straits as freely as they pass in and out of the Baltic.

15. There is a point of great importance to which all the powers, and none more than England, should direct their earnest attention; and that is the establishment and future maintenance of civil and religious liberty throughout these countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Every effort should be made to secure this great boon for all, whether Mahomedan or Christian, Bulgarian or Greek, Jew or Slave. What with oppression by Turkish rulers, and their refusal to admit judicial equality as between believers and unbelievers; what with the feuds and jealousies between different denominations of Christians; what with the ill-treatment of Jews by Roumanians and Servians, the great principles of civil and religious liberty have been shamefully trampled under foot. If England be, as the chancellor of the exchequer justly said she was, "the foremost representative of the spirit of freedom," there is a field in which her great influence may work to the good of these various peoples so long misgoverned, as well as to her own honor. How great is the necessity for undertaking

such a work is known to all acquainted with the state of things in south-eastern Europe. But, as much has been said, and very justly said, of Mahomedan oppression, it is only right to add that Turks are not the only sinners against the principle

of toleration. It is only too true that the Divine command, "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," has been habitually set at nought by Christian rulers in Church and State throughout the world, from the days of Constantine to the present hour. The fol

lowing statement, made by a Bulgarian Protestant,

proves how real is the need for seeing that all creeds and races have religious liberty guaranteed to them in the future. Francho Tourgoroff, pastor of the first Bulgarian Protestant Church at Bansko, Samokov Macedonia, thus writes at the beginning of this year, 1878:

1. The sufferings of the Protestant people in Bulgaria at the hands of the Greek Church authorities have been very great for years past, and now are, and no confidence should on any account be placed in the promises of the said Church; but a clause should be inserted in the treaty with the European powers to secure full liberty of worship to Protestants and dissenters from the Greek Church.

2. The spirit of cruelty, oppression, and superstition of the Greek Church

in Bulgaria is as great as that of the Romish Church at the time of the Reformation in England.

3. I was myself more than once imprisoned at the instigation of the Greek Church authorities; and last year my life would have been taken had it not been for the active interference of Mr. Blunt, the English consul at Salonica.

4. The Mahomedan government officers, when uninfluenced, allow us free religious liberty, and permitted us to have the quiet use of the Lord's day; and in some cases have even suspended collecting taxes, being told we transacted no secular business on that day.

5. Much of the suffering of the poor Bulgarians has been from the rich members of the Greek Church, together with the Turkish tax-gatherers and governors, who, for their own unjust profit, unite together and plunder the people.

6. Before the war began the Protestants were threatened by the members of the Greek Church that as soon as Russia comes they will be skinned alive, and letters of last week inform us that persecutions by the Greek Church have begun already.

7. The Protestant ministers and people in Bulgaria dreaded the approach of the Russian authority, joined as it is to the dark, cruel, and superstitious Greek Church; and at the approach of the Bashi-Bazouks, some of the men dared not flee with the Russians for safety, but remained, and were massacred by the Bashi-Bazouks, in their place of worship. 8. Lastly, I am prepared to make a statutory declaration of the correctness and truthfulness of the above statements.

(Signed)

FRANCHO TOURGOROFF,

Pastor of the Church at Bansko.

16. Such a picture shows how deeply rooted is the abomination of religious persecution. Now is the time to attack and overthrow it. More especially is it necessary to protect the smaller religious bodies from such injustice, inasmuch as the larger ones are better able to take care of themselves. The Mahomedans, too, who are left to dwell under the newly-formed governments, merit peculiar care, because from the very fact of the past tyranny of the Turkish officials, the Mussulmans who remain run the risk of becoming the victims of retaliatory vengeance. The consuls of the Christian powers, and foremost those of England, should carefully watch, and faithfully report to their governments, every instance of religious oppression, and so expose the perpetrators of this great evil, to whatever race or creed they may belong.

17. In this matter the kingdom of Greece deserves special praise for the complete civil and religious liberty which its constitution gives to all its subjects alike. Only quite lately M. Gennadius, the Greek Chargé d'Affaires, in a public speech pointing out the material progress Greece has made during a

single generation, added: "We have instituted a wide-spread educational organization, free of charge, unsectarian, and doing the work of the Greeks, not of the kingdom only, but of all the East. There is no branch of science or learning in which we cannot show men fully equal to the European average; and the Jews, who during the protection of the Ionian Islands enjoyed no citizen rights, were admitted to an equal position with any Greek citizen, not by any special enactment, but by the simple fact of the union, for there never existed with us any disabilities; and King George counts no more faithful and contented subjects than our Israelite brethren of Corfu, as they themselves declared about a year ago by their spontaneous notifications to the English press, and by the expressions of gratification conveyed to me personally by some of their co-religionists in this country. And I may add that there exists no Mussulman community, except perhaps in India, more contented and free than our Mussulman fellow-citizens at Chalcis, to whom all public posts are as widely open as to any Greek at Athens." This is as it should be. Such an example is well worth the imitation of the new government of Bulgaria; it is specially to be commended to Roumania and Servia, to the members of every race and creed throughout the Balkan Peninsula. The fact of the complete civil and religious liberty thus given by the constitution of the Greek kingdom is a strong argument for increasing that kingdom to the utmost possible extent which circumstances permit. England can adopt no better and wiser course than to further such extension; it is both right and expedient, from whatever point of view it is looked at by English statesmen. The influence of such a kingdom extending over as wide an area as possible would do incalculable good. It could not fail to promote the great cause of freedom among all the other races of south-eastern Europe. They would inevitably have to follow such a lead, even if they were otherwise disposed. As it is, the people of Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenegro, though grateful (as indeed they should be) for the assistance afforded to them by Russia, show no inclination to be governed from St. Petersburg. They would be also stimulated to obtain complete freedom and the largest liberties, both civil and religious, if they saw the southern portion of the Balkan Peninsula in the full enjoyment of a constitution free as that of England herself. Thus liberty and contentment would become the normal condition of the peoples

once misruled by the incapable, venal, and oppressive government of the Porte. Not only would such a change render foreign intrigues helpless, and secret societies useless, but it would exercise the happiest influence upon Russia herself. It is impossible that the Slave and Greek nationalities on her south-western frontier could be in the enjoyment of such a free system without creating among the Russian people a desire to possess a like freedom themselves. It might very possibly not take just the same outward forms, but in one shape or another it would assuredly make its way into the land of the czars. Russia can no more escape the influences of liberty and progress than France, Italy, and Austria have escaped them. The Bonapartes, the Hapsburgs, and all the former rulers of Italy, have had either to accept free institutions, or else have been overthrown by them. The Romanoff's equally will have to adapt their rule to the liberal movement which has overflown the whole continent of Europe, or share the fate of those who offer to it a blind and unavailing resistance. The more completely Russia is surrounded by free nations the more certain is she herself to swell their numbers. Nor are the signs wanting that she is capable of wise and timely reform. The abolition of serfdom, the enlargement of communal and municipal liberties, the reform of civil and criminal procedure, the institution of juries, the furtherance of national education, the more equitable system of taxation and of conscription, the lessening of press restrictions, are all proofs,-given within the last twenty years, not only that Russia has to submit to the great law of progress, but that she is capable of adapting herself to it. The formation on her southern frontier of new nationalities, freely governed and contented, in place of a system at once corrupt and tyrannical, based upon polygamy (the degradation of woman) and slavery (the degradation of humanity), cannot but be productive of good. Such a change furthers the cause not only of liberty, but of order; it is the victory alike of justice and of progress. As such it harmonizes with the interests of all Europe, and, from the latest advices, it would seem that the fearful results of a war between England and Russia would be happily averted, and all that we have been picturing as desirable for the populations of the disputed territories would be secured to them through nothing so much as the good offices of the British government, a government which has maintained a firm and determined policy in this whole Eastern diffi

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