After the declaration of Lord Clarendon and the withdrawal of the English agent from Bucharest, one might have believed in the evacuation-of course Russia will submit to anything to which the English Minister has made up his mind-if Lord Clarendon were a Grand Vizier: but he is only a member of a Cabinet, and in that Cabinet, alas! there are Lords Aberdeen, John Russell, and Palmerston; the latter is busy in representing Lord Stratford de Redcliffe as acting under the influence of pique. I do not therefore say that there will be no evacuation, but this I say, that Russia, if she evacuates, will lose nothing by it, for it will be with an arrangement to establish a common interference of the Powers with the subjects of Turkey.

A lie has been placed on the lips of Europe in the word Russo-Greek Church. The one is a form of Revealed Religion, the other is the worship of a man. In the official Church of Russia the Czar is "vicegerent of God upon earth," and as such is the object of FAITH " and " WORSHIP." The disease that preys on the vitals of the Russian Empire is religious dissent originating in this sacrilege. The Nonconformists maintain the original faith, such as it was when the Russian Church was in communion with that of Constantinople. The only name they give to themselves is that of "Old Believers,” in Russian Starovirtzé; they are therefore identified with the 12,000,000 or 13,000,000 of Christian subjects of the Porte in Europe; they are the objects of the most bitter persecutions on the part of the

Russian Government, and the familiar term they apply to the Emperor is "Antichrist." The recent movements towards independence of the MaloRussians, amounting to about 10,000,000, is principally attributable to this schism and persecution. Were there no Mussulmans in Europe, and Russia free to extend her dominion to the Ionian Sea, we should find her, if she attempted it, at once engaged in the most furious of religious wars, with populations, old subjects and new, amounting to 20,000,000.

This change in Russia Proper has required five centuries and a quarter, for it began in the year 1330. Fifteen generations of Muscovites have gone to their graves in the course of its completion. They were induced to submit, in the hope that the concentration of all power in the hands of the Czar would facilitate the subjugation of others. The Christian subjects of Turkey, born and bred under the habits of Mussulman toleration, filled with the most extravagant ambition by Muscovite art, will not resign in a single hour every political right and every conscientious conviction, and that too in the hour of triumph and for the subjugation of themselves. The Turks, if they had never strayed beyond their pasturages of Broussa, would, on such a contingency, be called in by the Christians for the protection of their Church and Faith. Such an event no doubt would be surprising, but it would not be new; the ablest polemical writer amongst the Greeks of the present age, has explained, in the very words I have used, the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Since the year 1816, the Sultan has become the immediate protector of the Starovirtzé, by having secured for them the Apostolic succession of their priesthood after that priesthood was seized by Russia, formed into regiments, and sent to die of ague in Lankeran, on the Caspian; he would stand in the same relation of Protector to his actual Greek subjects from the moment that he was driven into Asia by Russian arms. Such being the position of Russia with regard to the Christians of Turkey, her object in a joint intervention of the Powers is evident; she could never have moved them to propose such an intervention, but (as in 1826, when the Greeks declared they would rather perish than allow of her interference) she terrifies the Powers by a threat to act alone, and then they rush forward to yield to her their support, on the pretext of clogging her action! Then she can use the Sultan to establish her supremacy over the Oriental Church, whilst she uses it to break down the authority of the Sultan. From the moment that a common interference is established, any quarrel in the streets can bring down her squadron to Constantinople. The only danger is from Russian interference; the only course for Europe to take is to prevent it. The course which Europe always does take is to sanction it, by co-operating in it, giving to her their power for effecting it.

To prepare for her possession, she has to raise a religious persecution between Mussulmans and Christians, bringing in England and France to attack Turkey; she must engage Austria in a war of exter

mination with the neighbouring populations; by these means, or a union of the Roman and Russian Churches, she must break the confederacy of Greeks and Latins, which is sure to be formed against her. Besides these local operations, she has to work out a war between England and France, and a European revolution. Such are the preliminary steps to the elevation of the Christian subjects of Turkey to the rank of serfs, and to the pæans of Christendom for the long promised mass in St. Sophia.

Another illusion is, that the Christians of Turkey are Greeks, and consequently that they are united against the Mussulman rule. They amount to about 13,000,000, the Greeks not exceeding 1,000,000, and the half of them not a located population, but strangers, dispersed throughout the different citics. Unfortunately the Turks like them, and confide in them (one of them is actually Ambassador in London), but every other race hates and despises them. The Wallachians and Moldavians amount to 4,500,000; the Bulgarians, the descendants of the Tartars of the Volga, to 4,500,000, some of these are Mussulmans; the Bosnians, including the Serbians and Illyrians to 3,000,000, of these 1,000,000 are Mussulmans, and about 500,000 Roman Catholics; the Albanians to 1,500,000, half of them Christians of the Eastern Church, half of them Mussulmans. It will thus be seen that the Greeks have no standing at all in European Turkey, save that which they derive from the Turks. One-third of the Mussulmans are allied in blood to the Russians, and three-fourths of the Christians, south of the Danube, to the Turks. All

these populations have accepted the Turks as masters; not one of them would endure for a moment the supremacy of any of the others. If you had not the Turks, you would require to invent them, unless you wish to see European Turkey a chaos of bloodshed, not for the wretched inhabitants alone, but for Europe, and when so exhausted to be annexed to Russia, transferring to her a position which, in her hands, must command the globe.

What I have here said regarding the Greek and Russian Churches has been recently to the letter borne out by the statements in the Greek press, which reach us from the Levant. Their Smyrna organ warns Russia not to "indulge in illusions.” The EXTS, the organ of Hellenism, explains the object of the Czar in extorting the protectorate of the Oriental Church to be to convert it into an "instrument of his PANSLAVIC schemes," and denies "that the protection (!) of the Powers afforded to the Sultan is, as the journals of Russia pretend, the protection of Mahometanism against Christianity, but the defence of the political inheritance of the Hellenes (Greeks) against Russian incorporation, in which every Hellenic spirit must wish them success.'

The correspondence of the Vienna papers is in the same sense. "There is no nation," says the Oest Deutsch Post, "less inclined to be absorbed by Russia than the Greeks. When struggling for political existence, they looked on her as the victorious power that was to come to their assistance, but they rejected the proffered hand so soon as they perceived that it was more inclined to impose than to remove fetters."