which was really the breath of their nostrils; it had stimulated them
during the endless Macedonian insurrections to commit the most awful
outrages against each other's nationals and then lay the blame at the door
of the unfortunate Turk; and if the Turk should really regenerate himself,
not only would their occupation be gone, but the heavily-discounted
legacies would assuredly elude their grasp. At the same time, since the
whole policy of exhibiting and exploiting the horrors of Macedonia, and of
organizing guerilla bands and provoking intervention, was based on the
refusal of the Turks to grant reforms, as soon as the ultra-liberal
constitution of Midhat Pasha, which, had been withdrawn after a brief and
unsuccessful run in 1876, was restored by the Young Turks, there was
nothing left for the Balkan States to do but to applaud with as much
enthusiasm as they could simulate. The emotions experienced by the Balkan
peoples during that summer, beneath the smiles which they had to assume,
were exhausting even for southern temperaments. Bulgaria, with its
characteristic matter-of-factness, was the first to adjust itself to the
new and trying situation in which the only certainty was that something
decisive had got to be done with all possible celerity. On October 5,
1908, Prince Ferdinand sprang on an astonished continent the news that he
renounced the Turkish suzerainty (ever since 1878 the Bulgarian
principality had been a tributary and vassal state of the Ottoman Empire,
and therefore, with all its astonishingly rapid progress and material
prosperity, a subject for commiseration in the kingdoms of Serbia and
Greece) and proclaimed the independence of Bulgaria, with himself, as Tsar
of the Bulgars, at its head. Europe had not recovered from this shock,
still less Belgrade and Athens, when, two days later. Baron Aehrenthal
announced the formal annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by the Emperor
Francis Joseph. Whereas most people had virtually forgotten the Treaty of
Berlin and had come to look on Austria as just as permanently settled in
these two provinces as was Great Britain in Egypt and Cyprus, yet the