The mission of Von der Goltz in 1908 and that of Liman von Sanders in 1914 put the Turkish army under German command, and by the outbreak of the war German influence was predominant in Constantinople.  This political influence was, no doubt, used, and intended to be used, to further German economic schemes.  Germany, in fact, had come in to play the same game as the other Powers, and had played it with more skill and determination.  She was, of course, here as elsewhere, a new and disturbing force in a system of forces which already had difficulty in maintaining a precarious equilibrium.  But to be a new and disturbing force is not to commit a crime.  Once more the real culprit was not Germany nor any other Power.  The real culprit was the European anarchy.

[Footnote 1:  Pierre Albin, “D’Agadir a 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 Empire brings her also into conflict with Russia, so far as Russia is the protector of the Slavs.  The situation, and the danger with which it is pregnant, may be realized by an Englishman if he will suppose St. George’s Channel and the Atlantic to be annihilated, and Ireland to touch, by a land frontier, on the one side Great Britain, on the other the United States.  The friction and even the warfare which might have arisen between these two great Powers from the plots of American Fenians may readily be imagined.  Something of that kind is the situation of Austria in relation to Serbia and her protector, Russia.  Further, Austria fears the occupation by any Slav State of any port on the coast line of the Adriatic, and herself desires a port on the Aegean.  Add to this the recent German dream of the route from Berlin to Bagdad, and the European importance of what would otherwise be local disputes among the Balkan States becomes apparent.