The new direction of Russian policy, which has brought the aims of the
Russian Government into close accord with the desires of national Slav
sentiment, was determined by Balkan conditions. Bismarck had cherished
no Balkan ambitions: he had been content to play the part of an 'honest
broker' at the Congress of Berlin, and he had spoken of the Bulgarian
affair of 1885 as 'not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier.'
William II apparently thought otherwise. At any rate Germany seems to
have conducted, for many years past, a policy of establishing her
influence, along with that of Austria, through South-Eastern Europe. And
it is this policy which is the _fons et origo_ of the present struggle;
for it is a policy which is not and cannot be tolerated by Russia, so
long as Russia is true to her own Slav blood and to the traditions of
centuries.

After Austria had finally lost Italy, as she did in 1866, she turned for
compensation to the Balkans. If Venetia was lost, it seemed some
recompense when in 1878 Austria occupied Bosnia and the Herzegovina.
Hence she could expand southwards--ultimately perhaps to Salonica.
Servia, which might have objected, was a vassal kingdom, the protégé of
Austria, under the dynasty of the Obrenovitch. As Austria might hope to
follow the line to Salonica,[22] so Germany, before the end of the
nineteenth century, seems to have conceived of a parallel line of
penetration, which would carry her influence through Constantinople,
through Konieh, to Bagdad. She has extended her political and economic
influence among the small Slav states and in Turkey. In 1898 the King of
Roumania (a Hohenzollern by descent) conceded direct communication
through his territories between Berlin and Constantinople: in 1899 a
German company obtained a concession for the Bagdad railway from Konieh
to the head of the Persian Gulf. In a word, Germany began to stand in
the way of the Russian traditions of ousting the Turk and ruling in