THE ANGLO-TURKISH CONVENTION. 415 the rejection of the Convention. Ever since the Russo- X Turkish war, Russian authority has been supreme on the Bosphorus, and the mere intimation that the Czar did not wish the Convention signed would have been sufficient to cause the Sultan to refuse his signature, even if the intimation had not been accompanied — according to current report — by a statement that, if the Convention were accepted, Russia would deem herself entitled to occupy Turkish Armenia.

The Sultan, as usual, gave way, and proposed to England to withdraw the Convention, which Mukhtar Pasha had signed as his Majesty's Plenipotentiary, and to enter on negotiations for the conclusion of a fresh Convention, more in accordance with Turkish interests — a phrase which really signified more acceptable to Russia and to France. The refusal of the Sultan to sign the Convention was formally announced on the 14th of July, 1887, and on the following day Sir Drummond Wolff left Constantinople, whither he had returned from Cairo in order to secure the ratification of his Convention by the Porte. Died stillborn is the only epitaph that can be rightly employed with reference to the defunct Anglo-Turkish Convention.

I suspect the more one studies history, the more one finds that the success which attends certain nations at certain periods is due far more to what, for want of a better term, we call good luck, than to any special judgment and wisdom on the part of the nation so favoured. Whether this theory holds good or not as a general rule, it certainly holds good in