the south, in their task of
building up a free and united Albania, will admit the centre under
various conditions. These will have to be of a rather stern character,
or so at any rate they will seem to the folk of Tirana: taxes will have
to be paid, military service or service in the _gendarmerie_ will have
to be rendered, and schools will have to be established for both sexes.

This, then, is the future country of Albania, which--if one is rash
enough to prophesy--may exist in fifty years. But there is no risk
whatever in asserting that a free, united Albania is in the immediate
future quite impossible.

13. EUROPEAN MEASURES AGAINST THE YUGOSLAVS AND THEIR FRIENDS

Berati Beg, Tirana's delegate in Paris, said in an interview with a
representative of the Belgrade _Pravda_, at the beginning of November
1921, that he regretted that European diplomats should interfere in the
Serbo-Albanian question. "Are we not all," said he, "one large Balkan
family? And if the Powers intervene they will not act in our interests,
but in their own." He said that it used to be Austria which grasped at
Albania, now it was Italy. So the delegate showed that he was a
clear-sighted man; he also showed that in Tirana they are not unanimous
in loving the Italians. But alas! the Great Powers, urged by Italy, made
a most disastrous plunge; they actually, at least Great Britain, charged
the Serbs, their allies, on November 7, with being guilty of
overstepping the frontier, and on November 9 informed them where this
frontier was. It is a pity that Mr. Lloyd George should have launched
such a thunderbolt, the French Government not being consulted.[99] But
the most probable explanation of this lack of courtesy towards the
Serbs, and lack of the most elementary justice, is that the Prime
Minister, with his numerous preoccupations, allowed some incapable
person to act in his name.[100] The world was told, however, that Mr.
Lloyd George had sent a peremptory demand for the convocation of the
Council of the League of Nations so that a sanction should be applied
against the Yugoslavs. Mr. Lloyd George's substitute was so little
versed in the business that he did not even know that the League of
Nations is not a gendarme to carry out the decisions of the Ambassadors'
Conference. He should have been aware of the fact that this was a
problem for the Allied States, to be settled by diplomatic or other
measures, and he should also have known that the League