as a grave humiliation. But perhaps the chief consequence
of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a
whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand
the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally,
and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked
during the coming years, the national position of France would be
forfeited.

Following upon this crisis came, in the next year--still a consequence
of the Turkish Revolution--the sudden determination of the Balkan
States, including Greece, to attack Turkey. It was the King of
Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its
independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912,
with his own hand. In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were
universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself,
reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near
the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory
according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of
hostilities.

But here the Germanic Powers again intervened. The defeated Turkish
Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the
expansion of German and Austrian political military influence
throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and
policy. Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and
Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which
the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves. She would not
allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of
their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the
shores of the Adriatic. She proposed the creation of a novel State of
Albania under a German prince, to block Servia's way to the sea. She
further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia's annexing
the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to
Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the
east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and
Turkish.

The whole thing was characteristically German in type, ignoring and
despising national feeling and national right, creating artificial
boundaries, and flagrantly sinning against the European sense of
patriotism. A furious conflict between the various members of the
former Balkan Alliance followed; but the settlement which Aus