[Footnote 1: Pierre Albin, "D'Agadir à Serajevo," p. 81.]

[Footnote 2: _Hansard_, 1903, vol. 126, p. 120.]

[Footnote 3: _Nineteenth Century_, June 1909, vol. 65, p. 1090.]



14. _Austria and the Balkans_.


I turn now to the Balkan question. This is too ancient and too complicated
to be even summarized here. But we must remind ourselves of the main
situation. Primarily, the Balkan question is, or rather was, one between
subject Christian populations and the Turks. But it has been complicated,
not only by the quarrels of the subject populations among themselves, but
by the rival ambitions and claims of Russia and Austria. The interest of
Russia in the Balkans is partly one of racial sympathy, partly one of
territorial ambition, for the road to Constantinople lies through Rumania
and Bulgaria. It is this territorial ambition of Russia that has given
occasion in the past to the intervention of the Western Powers, for until
recently it was a fixed principle, both of French and British policy, to
keep Russia out of the Mediterranean. Hence the Crimean War, and hence
the disastrous intervention of Disraeli after the treaty of San Stefano
in 1878--an intervention which perpetuated for years the Balkan hell.
The interest of Austria in the peninsula depends primarily on the fact
that the Austrian Empire contains a large Slav population desiring its
independence, and that this national ambition of the Austrian Slavs finds
in the independent kingdom of Serbia its natural centre of attraction. The
determination of Austria to retain her Slavs as unwilling citizens of her