ities of Podgorica and Prizren. They confer no
offensive advantage on the Serbs, nor do they enable them to menace any
Albanian city.

To any impartial observer it is quite unjust that the Yugoslavs should
have had to plead against the frontier of 1913. They have not the least
desire to plant their flag on those undelectable mountains. If the
frontier of 1913 could be held with moderate efforts against these
people they would not wish to go an inch beyond it. But those who drew
this frontier, namely the Austrians, were not much concerned as to
whether it afforded adequate protection to the Serbs; what they had in
view was to keep them away from the Adriatic (for which reason an
arbitrary line cut through the proposed railway which was to link Pe['c]
to Podgorica and the sea) and to compel the Serbs to station in those
districts a goodly portion of their army, to which end--so that the
frontier should be weak--the towns of Djakovica and Prizren were
separated from their hinterland. The Austrian plan likewise prevented
the towns of Struga and Prizren from being joined by a road or by a
railway along the Drin; to go from one to the other it became necessary
to make an enormous detour. With the rectifications to which we have
referred, the Ambassadors' Conference decided to insist on them
returning to this miserable line, instead of permitting them to take up
their position where General Franchet d'Esperey perceived in 1918 that
they could be fairly comfortable. Monsieur Albert Mousset, the shrewd
Balkan expert of the _Journal des Debats_, has remarked that on too many
parts of the 1913 frontier it is as if one forced an honest man to sleep
with his door open among a horde of bandits.... The Albanian Government,
admitted to the League of Nations in December 1920, claimed that the
international statute of 1913, creating a German prince, the Dutch
_gendarmerie_ and the International Financial Commission--which happened
to be inconvenient--was no longer in force; but that the international
decisions as to the frontiers of Albania--which happened to be
convenient--were still valid. However, during the War the country had
been plunged in anarchy, and the Great Powers decided that Albania was,
in Mr. Temperley's words, a _tabula rasa_, a piece of white paper on
which they could write what they wished. In November 1921 the
Ambassadors' Conference finally decided on the frontiers. The gravest
violation of the ethnic principle was i