them! burn! kill! was the word; and whole settlements were obliterated with torch and sabre. Four villages at Oshen and Oshani went up in flame; the smoke of their burning was visible for many a mile, and was testified to by Bulgarians of another valley. The survivors tell of returning next day to find wife, child, stock and cottage lost, gone, or destroyed.

All sheer inventions, say the Greeks in our press. To which I reply, let the Carnegie Commissioners decide. These gentlemen, Messrs Brailsford and Miliukoff, gave King Constantine his opportunity. Accepting their commission upon the demand of King Ferdinand, they first visited Salonika and desired facilities to visit, inspect and take evidence. But this King Constantine the Bulgar-Killer would not hear of. In a Note to the Powers dated July 19, His Majesty professed to desire a Commission of Enquiry constituted upon the spot 'to determine if one single Bulgarian had been tortured by Greek soldiers.' The Commissioners arrived, and were ill received and peremptorily warned-off. Nor is this the only occasion on which enquiry was burked or refused. The 'Times' correspondent in the Balkans, a gentleman resident there for over a quarter of a century, published last year a series of articles on the war. His fourth article appeared in the issue of Dec. 9. In it he referred briefly to the charges against the Greek army contained in his telegram from Rilo which appeared in the Times' of Aug. 7. To this telegram H.M. King Constantine sent a sweeping denial, which was published in that paper about a week later. To this the correspondent replied (Times,' Aug. 21) offering, if H.M. desired it, to publish the evidence of the refugees upon which the original telegram was based. His Majesty failed to respond to this challenge, nor was any allusion to it permitted to appear in the Greek press.

For reasons undisclosed, New Greece was not in a condition to be inspected. But the Commissioners were welcomed at Sofia; every means of collecting information was placed at their disposal; and King Ferdinand and his people await their report with impatience. Almost the only man of British stock, Prof. W. S. Monro, an American, who has been able to penetrate the cordon and see with his own eyes the state of things, avers in a

letter now before me, that the Greek atrocities have been something appalling. The Bulgars have been horribly maligned by the English and American press,' etc.

Such were the methods; what was the object? The extermination of the non-Hellenic elements in the population of New Greece. In certain instances this object was fully attained. In preparing the lists of voters for the recent elections, the Bulgarian authorities found that from some of the villages all the males had disappeared except some old men and children. The aim is openly avowed in the Intercepted Letters, from which we take the following as typical examples. Pericles Soumblis writes to his father G. P. Soumblis, Megali Anastasova, Alagonia, Calamas: 'We have taken no prisoners, for such are our orders. Everywhere we burn the Bulgarian villages, so that that dirty race may never be able to recover itself. I embrace you, etc.' 'By order of the King, we set on fire all the Bulgarian villages.' 'We burn all the villages here and kill the Bulgarians, women and children.' 'Our orders are to burn the villages and massacre the young, sparing only the old men and children.' 'What we are doing to the Bulgarians is indescribable, as also to the Bulgarian villages-a butchery-there is not a Bulgarian town or village which has not been burnt.' 'Need I tell you, brother, that all the Bulgarians we take-and there are a good many-are put to death?' 'Of the 1200 prisoners we took at Nigrita only forty-one remain in the prisons, and wherever we have passed we have left no root of this race.' We burn all the Bulgarian villages that we occupy and kill all the Bulgarians who fall into our hands.' 'Not a cat escapes us.' 'We shoot them like sparrows.' But enough of these horrors. Inaugurated with a shriek for vengeance, the brief campaign was a pandemonium of lust, loot and blood, deliberately organised for political ends.

6

King Constantine had a singular opportunity of proving to Europe the capacity, civilisation and magnanimity of himself and his people. He preferred to play the rôle of Tamerlane; he has made a desert and calls it 'Greece.'

H. M. WALLIS.

Art. 12.-THE FUTURE OF RHODESIA.

I. FOR THE CHARTER.

IN considering the question of Chartered Company Rule in Rhodesia, it will save time and simplify argument if we assume certain grounds as common-that Cecil Rhodes was a patriot who desired to strengthen and extend the British Empire; that his main object in securing the North was to redress the balance of South Africa and make it predominantly British; that both the Cape Colony and the Imperial Government refused to undertake the work of occupying and administering the country; that there was imminent danger of an occupation either by the Transvaal Boers or by Germany when Rhodes intervened; that his device of rule by Chartered Company was the only practical course left to him; that Joint Stock Companies, however anomalous the practice may seem to be, have, as a matter of fact, acquired, civilised and administered a large part of the British Empire; and that in the present case of Rhodesia the British South Africa Company have acquired, settled and governed a very great territory, and in a space of twenty-five years brought it into the condition of a prosperous self-governing State under the British flag. I also take it as admitted that in this work they have received no financial or other assistance from the Imperial Government. And lastly, I take it as common ground that the shareholders, mainly British, who at the beginning numbered 16,000 and now number upwards of 40,000, and whose capital, originally a million sterling, had by 1912 increased to nine millions sterling, have never drawn a single dividend.

This point I dwell upon for a moment as important. The shareholders, who are at present more numerous than the colonists, naturally looked-and still lookfor some return upon their money. While the colonists, who number about thirty thousand, sometimes rage against the Company for considering the interests of Throgmorton Street, the shareholders can point to the millions which have been expended on the development of the country and for the benefit of the settlers, without a return, so far, of a single penny in the shape of profit.

The shareholders have loyally supported the colonists through a series of misfortunes that might have been expected to sink any enterprise and ruin any struggling colony-the Matabele War, the Jameson Raid, Rinderpest, the Matabele and Mashonaland Rebellions, the South African War, and the East Coast Fever. These great calamities tested the heroism and proved the grit of the settlers; but they also tested the grit, and I might almost add the heroism of the shareholders, who loyally supported the Directors through all these trying times with fresh capital given without complaint.

And there is one other position which I take as granted by both sides. Rhodes obtained the concessions by which settlement was permitted; the Company which held these concessions placed the settlers in the country, financed and organised the march of the pioneers, provided arms and police to protect them against the natives, connected them with civilisation, gave them grants of land, guaranteed their titles, and kept the community going through the troubles I have mentioned. Just as there could have been no Cape Colony without the backing of the Dutch East India Company, and no British India without the capital and enterprise of the British East India Company, so there could have been no Rhodesia without the British South Africa Company. We need not then enquire whether the Company has justified the twenty-five years of its existence. A territory larger than Germany, France, and the Low Countries combined, brought under the British flag, settled with British colonists, and provided with security of property and life, and the machinery of civilisation-this is sufficient answer to that question. What we have to consider is (1) specific criticisms of the Company in the past, and (2) the justification for the continuance of Company rule in the immediate future.

As to specific criticisms, they relate mainly to the past acts and policy of the Company-the early alienation of land in large blocks to other companies; the Company's claims upon the mineral industry; and the high railway rates. Now alienation of land in large blocks is a charge made against the government of most new countries. We hear it made in Canada, in

the United States, in Australia, and in New Zealand. In most of these countries it is commonly used as a 'plank' in Opposition platforms. And in Rhodesia the defence is at least as good as could be advanced by other sinners in this respect. The Administration, in its early stages, had to face the enormous expenditure due to the want of communications and the vast extent of the country, into which everything had to be imported at almost prohibitive rates; and it had also to meet the heavy drain entailed by a series of unexampled misfortunes. In these circumstances its resources were insufficient for the development of one of its assets, the land. On the other hand, this land-or the great bulk of it could not be developed by the individual settler, there being only a handful of colonists, and settlement by immigration being a slow and laborious process. To induce colonists to settle in a remote, undeveloped, and almost unknown land, where initial costs were enormous, and markets and communications as yet undeveloped, was obviously an almost impossible task.

The urgent need was to get a stream of capital applied to the development of the land; and the Company's capital was, as we have seen, diverted to other purposes by the harsh dictates of necessity. It had to build railways and roads, public offices and schools, to erect telegraph lines, to organise police and finance wars, and to stem the tide of great epidemics. The drain was so great that Rhodes mortgaged his personal income to this great task of what I may call creating the machinery of civilisation. The development of the land demanded fresh resources; and the only way to obtain these resources at that time was to allot large tracts of land to joint stock companies on the understanding that they would expend capital in Rhodesia. The object was to get development under way in the shortest possible time; and, if the policy did not achieve its object, it may at least be said that the object was at that time not achievable. The country had first to get through its almost fatal maladies of childhood before the land could be profitably developed, whatever method of development were adopted. Now that these troubles have been overcome, the policy of the Company has been changed; and the land will be gradually freed by purchase from the