and probably result in great advantages to both of the allies. The arguments for union are so patent and so strong that, sooner or later, it can hardly fail to take place. Objections to it there will be in plenty, but these will give way before an obvious common interest. The vile Turk! The abhorred Turk! Yes; he is not altogether nice. But we Britons have at present great poverty of friends, and poverty makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows. This seems to be our fate whether we like it or not – to fight again alongside of the Turk.
How we execrated and threatened the Turk some six or seven years ago! How we patted the Russians on the back, and bade them go and punish the hated Mussulmans, praying that God might go with them! We allowed ourselves to run wild with indignation at the so-called Bulgarian atrocities, as if the Turk had been a monster blackening and vilifying the lives of surrounding populations, his innocent and gentle neighbours. We have since discovered that he, if not what we could wish him, is at any rate no worse than Montenegrins, Servians, Bulgarians, and even Russians. They are all savages together; but the Turk is the savage who can be of most service to us. It is the Turk's good fortune that these things are so. It is the irony of his Kismet.
A remittance from the British exchequer will set in motion in an incredibly short time a brave and obedient army already within measurable distance of the enemy's frontier. All the heroic acts of Gazi Osman and Gazi Muktar may be repeated on Russian crests, with this difference – viz., that whereas in 1877 these leaders performed their exploits in spite of the most meagre transport, shortness of pay and provisions, deficient ammunition, and an almost entire want of modern appliances, they would now operate well furnished in all these respects. Let one only suppose what a boon it would be to the Turkish soldier to receive regular pay and his daily ration! On such terms he will not only fight bravely, but he will fight cheerfully. He would have a chance of winning such as has not fallen to him for many a year; and let him once begin to win – let him experience the glow of success – and he will assuredly take his change out of the Russians. We have half-pay officers and young men in plenty already sufficiently instructed, or capable of being sufficiently instructed, to partly officer the Turkish battalions, so that the latter may be brought up to the requirements of modern warfare. The movement will give employment to numbers of our idle youth, and give us the almost ready-made army which we require, with a way open by which to launch it on the foe. Surely, then, the despised and execrated Turk has something to offer us in our need. If the lion once helped the mouse thirty years ago (we will say nothing of the leonine freaks during the last ten years), the mouse has got his chance at last, and may "come out strong" now, as Mr Tapley used to say, in aid of the hampered lion. Whether Turkey may demand something besides revenge for the very material aid which her fortune enables her to place at our disposal, cannot now be divined; but we must not grudge her any reasonable advantage. We must compose our faces as well as we can to do the behest of circumstances. We must take our tonic without grimacing. It is Kismet.
But suppose the nation to be
