sed by the Berlin Congress, or by the line to Salonica,
which was in the hands of Austrian capitalists and ran through Turkish
territory. Therefore Serbia's independence, political and economic,
existed at Austria's pleasure; and this must be remembered in
extenuation of the secret Treaty[61] (June 23, 1881) whereby the Serbs
bound themselves for ten years to abstain from any propaganda or other
activity against the Habsburgs and to make no political treaties with
other Powers without the knowledge and consent of Vienna. Nor were any
foreign troops or volunteers to be allowed into Serbian territory. In
return for this the Emperor undertook to recognize Prince Milan as
King whensoever he might be pleased to assume that dignity (as he did
on March 6, 1882), to protect his dynasty from the Karageorgevi['c]
and to favour his acquisition of as much as possible of the valley of
the Vardar. The grateful Prince affirmed this Treaty (on October 24,
1881) by a still more emphatic declaration by which he appears to have
constituted himself a vassal of the Emperor. This infuriated the young
politicians whose radical ideas, mostly imbibed at Paris and Geneva,
were not balanced by the moral and social discipline which is the
fruit of an advanced civilization. As a result Serbia was given over
to chaos.... When Prince Alexander of Battenberg aquiesced in his
Bulgars annexing eastern Roumelia it was said that he was violating
the Berlin Treaty, but it is now known[62] that, in spite of the 1879
Treaty, this union had been foreseen and approved by Germany, Russia
and Austria-Hungary in 1881. Nevertheless Austria, which hoped to
embroil and enfeeble the two Slav States, urged Milan to declare war
against the Bulgars, and this he did the more willingly as he fancied
that it would divert from him the enmity of so many of his subjects;
but this war was such an unpopular enterprise that the King did not
dare to mobilize fully, and with his available forces indifferently
equipped and badly led, the upshot was that the Bulgars were
victorious. While Austria had thus been the Serb's evil genius,
Russia, by withdrawing all her officers from Bulgaria, again acted in
a manner which seemed scarcely to allow her and others, in 1915, to
denounce the Bulgars for their ingratitude. (The Russians, as a
subsequent Russian Minister at Sofia relates,[63] so completely
mishandled the situation in the early days of Bulgaria's freedom that
they had only themse