applied. The Macedonian chaos meanwhile grew steadily worse, and the
serious insurrections of 1902-3, followed by the customary reprisals,
thoroughly alarmed the powers. Hilmi Pasha had been appointed
Inspector-General of Macedonia in December 1902, but was not successful in
restoring order. In October 1903 the Emperor Nicholas II and the Emperor
of Austria, with their foreign ministers, met at Mürzsteg, in Styria, and
elaborated a more definite plan of reform known as the Mürzsteg programme,
the drastic terms of which had been largely inspired by Lord Lansdowne,
then British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; the principal feature
was the institution of an international gendarmerie, the whole of
Macedonia being divided up into five districts to be apportioned among the
several great powers. Owing to the procrastination of the Porte and to the
extreme complexity of the financial measures which had to be elaborated in
connexion with this scheme of reforms, the last of the negotiations was
not completed, nor the whole series ratified, until April 1907, though the
gendarmerie officers had arrived in Macedonia in February 1904.

At this point again it is necessary to recall the position in regard to
this question of the various nations concerned. Great Britain and France
had no territorial stake in Turkey proper, and did their utmost to secure
reform not only in the _vilayets_ of Macedonia, but also in the realm of
Ottoman finance. Italy's interest centred in Albania, whose eventual fate,
for geographical and strategic reasons, could not leave it indifferent.
Austria-Hungary's only care was by any means to prevent the aggrandizement
of the Serb nationality and of Serbia and Montenegro, so as to secure the
control, if not the possession, of the routes to Salonika, if necessary
over the prostrate bodies of those two countries which defiantly barred
Germanic progress towards the East. Russia was already fatally absorbed in
the Far Eastern adventure, and, moreover, had, ever since the war of 1878,
been losing influence at Constantinople, where before its word had been