242 



REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



Ministers of instig^ating the murder ; 

 the Vossische Zeitung said that " if any 

 ordinary citizen of any State had been 

 so incriminated as Prince Ferdinand has 

 been, the man would have been 

 arrested." No one was arrested ; no one 

 was punished. 



A SUPPLE ARTIFICER OF GREATNESS. 



It will be seen that those who dismiss 

 King Ferdinand as a mere scented pop- 

 injay are wofully mistaken. To have 

 come a stranger into a land seething 

 with rebellion — a land where he was to 

 have been a prince in name and a mere 

 instrument of polic}' in fact — -to have 

 matched himself against the Bulgarian 

 Bismarck and overthrown him, to have 

 won his crown and made himself " a 

 King indeed," as despotic as any King 

 in Europe, to stand at the end of 

 twenty-hve years at the head of an 

 arm}- that has astonished the world and 

 at the head of a League that confronts 

 Europe with a new political fact of the 

 first magnitude — all this implies more 

 than the vanity and the febrile futility 

 with which his enemies credit him. lie 

 is "the artful Augustus" of a later 

 Gibbon, a Napoleon the Third whh 

 more than Napoleon's calculation and 

 to be allowed to go to Karlsbad for his statesmanship. "I am the rock against 

 health. The request was refused by the which the waves beat in vain," he said 

 Government. He then declared publicly grandiloquentl)- long ago — and his 



Kladderadatuch. 



[Berlin. 



A TYPIOAI. OARTQiON OF KING FERDINAND. 

 Rou.MANi.\: " Can I have a little meat as well?" 

 BiLGARiA: No, certainly not; it was I who stole 



the pig." 



that he was being kept in Sofia to be 

 murdered. 



MURDER. 



On the 15th July, 1895, in the streets 

 of Sofia, with the police looking on, he 

 was brutally butchered — not merely 

 murdered, but mutilated. Prince Ferdi- 

 nand, who had gone to Karlsbad, tele- 

 graphed his grief to the widow and 

 ordered his highest Court official to 

 tender his condolences to her person- 

 ally. The telegram was unanswered ; 

 the official was refused admission. 

 Europe rang with the murder. Petkoff, 

 who narrowly escaped death with his 

 friend, denounced the Prince ; the 

 Svoboda openly accused him and his 



courtiers laughed. He is not that. But 

 he is the supple artificer of greatness, 

 innocent of scruple, swift to take for- 

 tune at the flood, one who " makes nice 

 of no vile hold to stay him up," and 

 has that wonderful instinct of self- 

 preservation which enables him in all 

 emergencies to fall lightly upon his 

 feet, iie applies the arts of the mediae- 

 val prince to Twentieth Century condi- 

 tions and Machiavelli himself would 

 have little to teach him. His career is 

 the romance of modern kingship. His 

 success is as vast as ins ambition. There 

 is no spot upon his sun. 



Yes. one. There is the dead hand of 

 Stambuloff". 



