l about the forests and mountains
without molestation.

So far Venezelos had devoted himself to internal reconstruction, after the
precedent of Trikoupis, but he was not the man to desert the national
idea. The army and navy were reorganized by French and British missions,
and when the opportunity appeared, he was ready to take full advantage of
it. In the autumn of 1912, Turkey had been for a year at war with Italy;
her finances had suffered a heavy drain, and the Italian command of the
sea not only locked up her best troops in Tripoli, but interrupted such
important lines of communication between her Asiatic and European
provinces as the direct route by sea from Smyrna to Salonika, and the
devious sea-passage thence round Greece to Scutari, which was the only
alternative for Turkish troops to running the gauntlet of the Albanian
mountaineers. Clearly the Balkan nations could find no better moment for
striking the blow to settle that implacable 'preliminary question.' of
national unity which had dogged them all since their birth. Their only
chance of success, however, was to strike in concert, for Turkey,
handicapped though she was, could still easily outmatch them singly.
Unless they could compromise between their conflicting claims, they would
have to let this common opportunity for making them good slip by
altogether.

Of the four states concerned, two, Serbia and Montenegro, were of the same
South-Slavonic nationality, and had been drawn into complete accord with
each other since the formal annexation of Bosnia by Austria-Hungary in
1908, which struck a hard blow at their common national idea, while
neither of them had any conflicting claims with Greece, since the Greek
and South-Slavonic nationalities are at no point geographically in
contact. With Bulgaria, a nation of Slavonic speech and culture, though
not wholly Slavonic in origin, Serbia had quarrelled for years over the
ultimate destiny of the Ueskueb district in north-western Macedonia, which
was still subject to Turkey; but in the summer of 1912 the two states
compromised in a secret treaty upon their respective territorial
ambitions, and agreed to refer the fate of one debatable strip to the
arbitration of Russia, after their already projected war with Turkey had
been carried through. There was a more formidable conflict of interests
between Bulgaria and Greece. These two nationalities are conterminous over
a very wide extent of territory, stretching fro