THE SOUTH. PART I.-THE DANUBE AND THE EUXINE. PART II.-THE COMMERCE OF THE LEVANT AND THE RED SEA. "I offer you the half of Europe, I will help you to obtain it, secure you in the possession of it, and all I ask in return is the possession of a single Strait, which is also the key of my House."-ALEXANDER TO Napoleon. PART I. THE DANUBE AND EUXINE. CHAPTER I. The Commerce of Europe and Asia. "Peter had long meditated the project of the occupation of the Caspian, thus to draw the commerce of Asia and a part of India within his dominions."-VOLTAIRE. WHILE SO many lives are risked to find out the sources of the Niger, and the currents of the Pole, what discoveries in the centre of Europe await the enterprising navigator in his library chair! The course of the Danube is indeed laid down upon our maps; the volume of its waters, and their velocity minutely determined on our statistical tables; but mystery, deeper than Colchian darkness, envelopes the hidden sources of its fictitious nullity, and the frigifying processes of its Arctic obstructions. The paramount importance of the freedom of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to the well-being of the people, and the independence of the nations, of Europe, none will deny. The Black Sea linking these to the Danube, and that river joined by railway to the Rhine, we have a system of communication by internal waters, which armies can span and batteries close, capable of realising the old maxim of Neptune's lordship of the land. That ancient supremacy rested upon the joining of rafters and the man : * ning of ships this was no commonplace or practical affair; the element itself was to be created. The Danube pursued its tranquil course through the picturesque Teutonic valleys, the vast plains of the descendants of the Avars, and the teeming granaries, the inheritance of the Dacians; the Euxine nestled in the bosom of the Othmanic King: the Bosphorus and Dardanelles bisected his states. These water courses, dispersed to many nations, were clung to by each, and all had to surrender up their patrimonies before this unity could appear. It was not by any of the partners that this new edifice was planned; a stranger conceived it; possessed herself of the ground for its erection; has gone on from foundation to parapet, from story to story, buttress to buttress; the covering in is all that is now wanting to this creation of enchantment, surrounded, as it has risen, by that cloud of invisibility which conducted Eneas into the Tyrian citadel; here has been surpassed the invention of the bards of Etruria and Samos, and by illusion the means have been found of acquiring such command of the will of the world as they have achieved of its admiration. At the time that this project was first formed the frontiers of Russia on the west were restrained behind the Dnieper, and on the east fell far short of the Caucasus; she had no port whatever, or outlet, upon the Black Sea, and touched the Caspian only by uninhabited wastes. Yet the first basis of operations required that she should be in possession of the Danubian provinces and of the control of that river; that she should be in possession of the trans-Caucasian provinces, and have the control of the Araxes; also that rival flags should be excluded from the Caspian and the Euxine. The sudden expansion of Russian power under Peter the Great does not require repetition. Sir John M'Neill has traced it with a masterly hand, and after referring to the disaster on the Pruth, and the recovery of Persia under Nadir Shah, he concludes his sketch in these words: "Populum late regem." "The |