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 protege 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 Constantinople:  she began to buttress the Turk, to train his army, to exploit his country, and to seek to oust Russia generally from South-Eastern Europe.

In 1903 the progress of Austria and Germany received a check.  A blood-stained revolution at Belgrade ousted the pro-Austrian Obrenovitch, and put in its place the rival family of the Karageorgevitch.  Under the new dynasty Servia escaped from Austrian tutelage, and became an independent focus of Slav life in close touch with Russia.  The change was illustrated in 1908, when Austria took advantage of the revolution in Turkey, led by the Young Turks, to annex formally the occupied territories of Bosnia and the Herzegovina.  Servia, which had hoped to gain these territories, once a part of the old Servian kingdom, was mortally offended, and would have gone to war with Austria, if Russia, her champion under the new dynasty, could only have given her support.  But Russia, still weak after the Japanese war, could not do so; Russia,