future, altogether incommensurate with any possible advantages which might accrue.  Indeed, Italy would probably be well advised to abandon all idea of an Albanian adventure (which, originally conceived as a counterstroke to Austrian aggression, would lose its point if Austria disappeared from the scene), to leave the Greeks a free hand in south Epirus, to cede to them Rhodes and the other islands occupied during the Tripolitan War, and then to secure, during the partition of Turkey, the reversion of Cilicia and the Gulf of Alexandretta.  It is in any case clear that the Powers of the Triple Entente will raise no objections to such action on the part of Italy, and are resolved to show every consideration to a power whose great and vital interests in the Mediterranean in no way conflict with their own.

Sec.12. The Balkan Situation:  Bulgaria and Greece.—­The creation of a Greater Roumania and of a new Southern Slav State would transform the whole Balkan situation, and therefore obviously involves material concessions to Bulgaria and Greece.

(A) If Roumania succeeds in redeeming her kinsmen across the northern frontiers, she cannot be so ungenerous as to insist upon retaining territory whose population is overwhelmingly Bulgarian, and the least which might be expected from her would be the retrocession to Bulgaria of her bloodless acquisition during the second Balkan War.  This means a reversion to the boundary defined under Russian arbitration at Petrograd in January 1913—­except outside the fortress of Silistria, where strategic reasons demand its rectification.

It is in the relations of Bulgaria and Serbia, however, that the key to the Balkan situation is to be found.  The Serbo-Bulgarian treaty of February 1912, which formed the groundwork of the Balkan alliance, had limited Serbia’s sphere of influence to northern Macedonia and referred to the arbitration of the Russian Tsar any disputes arising from conquests to the south of a certain specified line.  Serbia was tacitly given a free hand in her attempt to reach the sea in Northern Albania.  The action of Austria-Hungary in vetoing her access to the Adriatic forced Serbia to turn her eyes from west to south and to seek her economic outlet to the sea down the valley of the Vardar to Salonica and the Aegean.  The cession of Monastir, Ochrida, and the Vardar Valley to Bulgaria would have rendered this impossible, for it would not merely have driven a wedge between Serbia and Greece, but would have placed two customs frontiers, the Bulgarian and the Greek, between Serbia and the sea, instead of only one, the Turkish, as hitherto.  Shut in upon all sides, with all hope of expansion blocked by the powerful Dual Monarchy to north and west and by a big Bulgaria to east and south, Serbia would have found herself in a worse position than before the war.  The Bulgarians, intoxicated by their victories over the Turks and seduced by the promptings of the Austrian tempter, turned a deaf ear to the arguments of their