were brutally cruel to the Jewish people
within their frontiers) decided to interfere. Russia was forced to
conclude the peace of San Stefano (1878) and the question of the Balkans
was left to a Congress which convened at Berlin in June and July of the
same year.

This famous conference was entirely dominated by the personality of
Disraeli. Even Bismarck feared the clever old man with his well-oiled
curly hair and his supreme arrogance, tempered by a cynical sense
of humor and a marvellous gift for flattery. At Berlin the British
prime-minister carefully watched over the fate of his friends the Turks.
Montenegro, Serbia and Roumania were recognised as independent kingdoms.
The principality of Bulgaria was given a semi-independent status under
Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a nephew of Tsar Alexander II. But none
of those countries were given the chance to develop their powers and
their resources as they would have been able to do, had England been
less anxious about the fate of the Sultan, whose domains were necessary
to the safety of the British Empire as a bulwark against further Russian
aggression.

To make matters worse, the congress allowed Austria to take Bosnia and
Herzegovina away from the Turks to be "administered" as part of the
Habsburg domains. It is true that Austria made an excellent job of it.
The neglected provinces were as well managed as the best of the British
colonies, and that is saying a great deal. But they were inhabited by
many Serbians. In older days they had been part of the great Serbian
empire of Stephan Dushan, who early in the fourteenth century had
defended western Europe against the invasions of the Turks and whose
capital of Uskub had been a centre of civilisation one hundred and fifty
years before Columbus discovered the new lands of the west. The Serbians
remembered their ancient glory as who would not? They resented the
presence of the Austrians in two provinces, which, so they felt, were
theirs by every right of tradition.

And it was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, that the archduke
Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was murdered on June 28 of the
year 1914. The assassin was a Serbian student who had acted from purely
patriotic motives.

But the blame for this terrible catastrophe which was the immediate,
though not the only cause of the Great World War did not lie with the
half-crazy Serbian boy or his Austrian victim. It must be traced back
to the days of the famou