address. It is hardly to be believed that a Turk, left to himself, would
by his own efforts have found out the primeval kindred between Turk and
Magyar. He might remember that Magyar exiles had found a safe shelter on
Ottoman territory; he might look deep enough into the politics of the
present moment to see that the rule of Turk and Magyar alike is
threatened by the growth of Slavonic national life. But the idea that
Magyar and Turk owe each other any love or any duty, directly on the
ground of primeval kindred, is certainly not likely to have presented
itself to the untutored Ottoman mind. In short, it sounds, as some one
said at the time, rather like the dream of a professor who has run wild
with an ethnological craze, than like the serious thought of a practical
man of any nation. Yet the Magyar students seem to have meant their
address quite seriously. And the Turkish general, if he did not take it
seriously, at least thought it wise to shape his answer as if he did. As
a piece of practical politics, it sounds like Frederick Barbarossa
threatening to avenge the defeat of Crassus upon Saladin, or like the
French of the revolutionary wars making the Pope Pius of those days
answerable for the wrongs of Vercingetorix. The thing sounds like
comedy, almost like conscious comedy. But it is a kind of comedy which
may become tragedy, if the idea from which it springs get so deeply
rooted in men's minds as to lead to any practical consequences. As long
as talk of this kind does not get beyond the world of hot-headed
students, it may pass for a craze. It would be more than a craze, if it
should be so widely taken up on either side that the statesmen on either
side find it expedient to profess to take it up also.

To allege the real or supposed primeval kindred between Magyars and
Ottomans as a ground for political action, or at least for political
sympathy, in the affairs of the present moment, is an extreme case--some
may be inclined to call it a _reductio ad absurdum_--of a whole range of