he
chief brunt of the fighting against the Turk:

They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.[2]

[2] Tennyson's well-known sonnet.

By the creation of Albania Montenegro was debarred from any great
territorial gain out of the partition of the Turks' old estate in the
Balkans, and was shut back on her mountains, as it seemed irrevocably.
Servia and Greece were left with almost as serious grievances. Albania
therefore is a constant source of temptation to a war of enterprise on
the part of three of the Balkan nations, and the war only awaits a
favourable opportunity to break out: a pretext for it can always be
supplied at a day's notice by some border collision with the wild and
lawless Albanian clans. Should the war in Albania spread to her
neighbours, Bulgaria, outraged and mortified by the Treaty of Bucharest
and again robbed and humiliated by Turkish encroachments on her
powerlessness after that Treaty, in all probability will seize the
opportunity to make a war of requital on some one of her neighbours, and
the Balkan Peninsula will then be again drenched in blood. There will be
again a cry of shocked horror from Western Europe as to these
"quarrelsome and bloodthirsty" Balkan peoples. But in fair play and
justice there is more reason for the little Balkan peoples to be shocked
and horrified at the cold-blooded policy of the Great Powers who, for
their own ends, create conditions which make peace in the Balkans
impossible.

The truth is that these little shreds of peoples, in the blood-soaked
Peninsula which destiny marked out to be the great battle-ground of
races, have been used as pawns in the great game of European diplomacy
ever since the fall of Napoleon. It will be recalled that one of the
earlier dreams of that ambitious genius was to enter the serv