We hope that Turkish statesmen, whose enlightenment and intelligence are well known, will recognize the urgent necessity for a sincere understanding between the two neighbouring States on the basis of the cession of the two provinces in accordance with the Berlin Treaty; then perhaps, later on, a union may be formed in order to oppose the common enemy. The obsolete policy of _non possumus_, behind which Turkey persists in sheltering herself has been, on more than one occasion, hurtful and fatal to her.
The province of Epirus, without the town and department of Jannina, is like a body without a head. The town of Jannina, which fills so glorious a page in the modern history of Hellenism, has been ever since its foundation the capital of Epirus in every point of view. It is only the bad faith of the Turkish Government which could take advantage of the inconceivable patriotism of the Albanians to create all of a sudden an Albanian nationality. It is true that there does exist an Albanian race, an insignificant branch of that powerful tree of the Hellenic family; but this race has never played an important, independent, free part in history. Once only, in the time of Scanderbeg, does Albania appear to have fulfilled a separate mission, in fighting against the Turks for the liberty and independence of her rugged mountains; but the brilliant star of this memorable and almost unique epoch in the poor history of Albania, the famous hero of Croia, according to recent researches into this part of the history of the Middle Ages, was not of Albanian origin. In those long combats for Hellenic liberty and independence, when the Albanian race fought with the _ilephtes_ and _armatoles_ of the national regeneration, it was not an Albanian idea which inspired those brave champions of our independence: it was the Greek standard, it was the _sabanum_ of Constantine, under the shadow of which the tyrant was combated by the Greek patriots, and by those who, in this time of sophism and paradoxes, plume themselves upon Albanian nationality, in claiming with incomparable _naïveté_, in documents and manifestoes in which historical traditions are disfigured, the independence and liberty of a nation which never existed in history. These mountaineers, these intrepid combatants in a holy cause, remained, during all that revolutionary epoch of Greece, in the rear of the Hellenic idea, which was doubtless their national idea. This idea impresses its peculiar stamp on the life of the nation, in its material, moral, and intellectual existence; but such has never existed in the Albanian race. Unity of history, of language, of religion, all that constitutes the essence of nationality, is altogether wanting in the Albanians. This is not the time to discuss all the obsolete and paradoxical things which have lately been said about the Albanians by anthropologists, ethnologists, &c. &c. We do not wish, either, to pronounce against them the death-sentence of the celebrated geographer Kiepert, who wrote some time ago in the _National Zeitung_ of Berlin, "We think the total dissolution of this part of an important and very ancient nation, which always retrogrades" to be very probable, and useful for European interests. Doubtless, the Albanians have a right of historical existence; but that history in which is always represented more or less the famous scientific conception of the great naturalist of modern times, the _struggle for existence_, is favourable only for those who know how to work and struggle successfully in the arena of civilization. Up to this moment, this race has been entirely unknown in history. A learned German naturalist, Haeckel, has found in this region of Eastern Europe the rudiments of a savage life exactly resembling as to manners the state of pre-historic times, especially in Upper Albania, where this race has a numerical and national preponderance. The Albanian nationality, then, about which its _soi-disant_ representatives have made so much noise, has no real existence, and is at this day but a national Utopia, a _terra incognita_, existing only in the ardent imagination of certain high functionaries of the Sublime Porte, and certain religious fanatics of Mussulman Albania. As for the non-Mussulmans, they still remain supporters and friends of the Hellenic idea and of the Greeks, with whom they have always made common cause, and have played a glorious part in our history by their courage and patriotism.