sentiment. That action of the Czar, however, was clear notification
and proof to all the world that Russia regarded the Slav States in
the Balkans as objects of her peculiar concern and protection.

The first Balkan War--the war of the Allies against Turkey--ended in
a way that surprised all the world. Everybody expected a victory for
the Turks. That the Turks should one day be driven out of Europe was
the universal assumption, but it was the equally fixed belief that
the agents of their expulsion would be the Great Powers or some of
the Great Powers. That the little independent States of the Balkans
should themselves be equal to the task no one imagined,--no one with
the possible exception of the government of Russia. And as Russia
rejoiced over the victory of the Balkan States and the defeat of her
secular Mohammedan neighbor, Austria-Hungary looked on not only with
amazement but with disappointment and chagrin.

For the contemporaneous diplomacy of the Austro-Hungarian government
was based on the assumption that the Balkan States would be
vanquished by Turkey. And its standing policy had been on the one
hand to keep the Kingdom of Servia small and weak (for the Dual
Monarchy was itself an important Serb state) and on the other hand
to broaden her Adriatic possessions and also to make her way through
Novi Bazar and Macedonia to Saloniki and the Aegean, when the time
came to secure this concession from the Sultan without provoking a
European war. It seemed in 1908 as though the favorable moment had
arrived to make a first move, and the Austro-Hungarian government
put forward a project for connecting the Bosnian and Macedonian
railway systems. But the only result was to bring to an end the
co-operation which had for some years been maintained between the
Austrian and Russian governments in the enforcement upon the Porte