ABSTRACT
Our heroine’s prognostication was verified – a military dictatorship succeeded to power during the unlooked-for interregnum in Russia, and cast in its lot with the most aggressive section of the Panslavonic party. The old quarrel with Turkey was revived, on a pretext about arrears of an indemnity due from ’77, and the upshot was that eighty thousand Russians, under General Polishoff, passed Kars, and marched upon Erzeroum. The terrified Sultan called upon Allah and his friends – that is, Turkish bondholders – all over Europe, to come to his aid in this extremity, and the Bungling Coalition, under pressure of influential capitalists, was weak enough to be drawn into an entanglement involving such national discredit that the sober judgment of the country succumbed for the time to the Jingo element, and an auxiliary expedition for the defence of Asia Minor was resolved upon.
