in which the Balkan States themselves undertook the war, it was desirable that at any rate an attempt should be made to create an independent state of Albania, though no one who knew the local conditions felt confident as to its ultimate career.  Its creation assuaged the consciences of the Liberal Government in Great Britain and at the same time admirably suited the strategic plans of Austria-Hungary.  It left that country a loophole for future diplomatic efforts to disturb the peace of south-eastern Europe, and, with its own army in Bosnia and its political agents and irregular troops in Albania, Serbia and Montenegro, even though enlarged as it was generally recognized they must be, would be held in a vice and could be threatened and bullied from the south now as well as from the north whenever it was in the interests of Vienna and Budapest to apply the screw.  The independence of Albania was declared at the conference of London on May 30, 1913.  Scutari was included in it as being a purely Albanian town, and King Nicholas and his army, after enjoying its coveted flesh-pots for a few halcyon weeks, had, to their mortification, to retire to the barren fastnesses of the Black Mountain.  Serbia, frustrated by Austria in its attempts, generally recognized as legitimate, to obtain even a commercial outlet on the Adriatic, naturally again diverted its aims southwards to Salonika.  The Greeks were already in possession of this important city and seaport, as well as of the whole of southern Macedonia.  The Serbs were in possession of central and northern Macedonia, including Monastir and Okhrida, which they had at great sacrifices conquered from the Turks.  It had been agreed that Bulgaria, as its share of the spoils, should have all central Macedonia, with Monastir and Okhrida, although on ethnical grounds the Bulgarians have only very slightly better claim to the country and towns west of the Vardar than any of the other Balkan nationalities.  But at the time that the agreement had been concluded it had been calculated in Greece and Serbia that Albania, far from being made independent, would be divided between them, and that Serbia, assured of a strip of coast on the Adriatic, would have no interest in the control of the river Vardar and of the railway which follows its course connecting the interior of Serbia with the port of Salonika.  Greece and Serbia had no ground whatever for quarrel and no cause for mutual distrust, and they were determined, for political and commercial reasons, to have a considerable extent of frontier from west to east in common.  The creation of an independent Albania completely altered the situation.  If Bulgaria should obtain central Macedonia and thus secure a frontier from north to south in common with the newly-formed state of Albania, then Greece would be at the mercy of its hereditary enemies the Bulgars and Arnauts (Albanians) as it had previously been at the mercy of the Turks, while Serbia would have two frontiers between itself and the sea instead of one,