itive regions, where part of the people
cannot, as yet, be restrained from perpetual warfare, it would have been
better if the politicians had done nothing but confirm the General's
frontier. Franchet d'Esperey gave it to the Serbs "for the time being,"
and that period should last until there is no longer any military need
to hold it. "No General, however distinguished, could possibly have any
authority whatever to give to any nation the territories of another,
such as can only be transferred and delineated by treaties and
international recognition." So says Mr. H. E. Goad, or Captain Goad as
he has the right to call himself. But it is a pity that he does not
appreciate the difference between that which is temporary and that which
is not.

Italy has been given against the Yugoslavs a purely strategic frontier,
which places under her dominion over 500,000 unwilling Slovenes, whose
culture is admittedly on a higher level than that of their Italian
neighbours. And yet the Ambassadors' Conference (in which Italy plays a
prominent part) has refused to give Yugoslavia a strategic frontier
against a much more turbulent neighbour, which frontier, moreover, would
include of alien subjects only a small fraction of the number which
Italy has obtained. The Albanian frontier now imposed on Yugoslavia is
very much like that which the treaties of 1815 gave to France, when the
passage (_trouee_) of Couvin, often called erroneously the trouee of the
Oise, at a short distance from Paris, was purposely opened. "Formerly,"
says Professor Jean Brunhes,[107] "the sources of the Oise belonged to
France, protected, far back, by the two enclaves of Philippeville and
Marienbourg, both fortified by Vauban." And M. Gabriel Hanotaux[108]
remarks that this opening of the trouee of Couvin was the reason why in
1914 France lost the battle of Charleroi.

The Ambassadors' Conference has committed a grave injustice. "Let us
hope," says M. Justin Godart,[109] a French ex-Under Secretary of
Hygiene, concerning whose very misguided mission to Albania we have
written elsewhere,[110] "let us hope," says he--in my opinion one of the
unjustest men towards Yugoslavia and Greece--"let us hope that
Yugoslavia will understand that it is unworthy of her to contest the
decision of the Ambassadors' Conference." It has given to the Yugoslavs
a frontier that necessitates the presence of a considerable army, and
this is precisely what suits the Italians. Seeing that in