er political and economic
influence among the small Slav states and in Turkey. In 1898 the King of
Roumania (a Hohenzollern by descent) conceded direct communication
through his territories between Berlin and Constantinople: in 1899 a
German company obtained a concession for the Bagdad railway from Konieh
to the head of the Persian Gulf. In a word, Germany began to stand in
the way of the Russian traditions of ousting the Turk and ruling in
Constantinople: she began to buttress the Turk, to train his army, to
exploit his country, and to seek to oust Russia generally from
South-Eastern Europe.

In 1903 the progress of Austria and Germany received a check. A
blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian
Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the
Karageorgevitch. Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian
tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch
with Russia. The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took
advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex
formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina. Servia,
which had hoped to gain these territories, once a part of the old
Servian kingdom, was mortally offended, and would have gone to war with
Austria, if Russia, her champion under the new dynasty, could only have
given her support. But Russia, still weak after the Japanese war, could
not do so; Russia, on the contrary, had to suffer the humiliation of
giving a pledge to the Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg that she
would not support Servia. That humiliation Russia has not forgotten. She
has saved money, she has reorganized her army, she has done everything
in her power to gain security for the future. And now that Austria has
sought utterly to humiliate Servia on the unproved charge (unproved, in
the sense that no legal proof was offered)[23] of complicity in the
murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Russia has risked
war rather than surrender her protection of a Slav kingdom. Slav
sentiment imperatively demanded action in favour of Servia: no
government could refuse to listen to the demand. The stake for Russia is
not merely the integrity of Servia: it is her prestige among the Slav
peoples, of which she is head; and behind all lies the question whether
South-Eastern Europe shall be under Teutonic control, and lost to
Russian influence.

Germany has not only threatened Slav life in South-