aug. 7.
'THE news contained in our issue of Friday that Greek troops had crossed the Turkish border would, if announced a, few years ago, have startled Europe like a trumpet blast. Had this incident taken place before the fateful August of 1914, what excitement there would have been in Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg, as well as in Paris and London.
'That the news, pregnant as it is with possibilities of disaster, has been received so phlegmatically is a proof that the agony of the Great War has, very largely, cleared the atmosphere and that the state of tension in' which the Burope of that day lived has been considerably relaxed. It used to be said that the Balkans were a powder magazine. Subsidiary fuses ran from that central storehouse of explosives to gigantic ammunition dumps in Vienna, Berlin and St. Petersburg. Now th powder in the central magazine has been effectually damped and the dumps are non-existent so the thunder of Greek guns awakens only dulled reverberations in the hills. of Thrace. Europe, immersed in economic problems, hears them with languid interest.
What do the Greeks want that they thus- unceremoniously let slip the dogs of war? The answer was given by an up-country correspondent in a letter which we printed recently. The Greeks want Constantinople. They look back to the days when Byzantium was the capital of the Eastern Empire and dream of re-creating the vanished glories of Rome. This caryles the feud back to 1453 and the days of the Crusaders, but to.the present generation the history of the Eastern questions begins with the Bulgarian mas-sacros of 1876, the Russo-Turkish war which followed and the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The efforts of the diplomatists were ho more successful in Berlin than "they were later at Versailles. '*Punch'' very aptly caricatured the gathering when he pictured Disraeli, then British Premier and delegate to the congress, as
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.