The next step in this series was a challenge advanced by Germany against that arrangement whereby Morocco, joining as it did to French North Africa, should be abandoned to French influence, so far as England was concerned, in exchange for the French giving up certain rights of interference they had in the English administration of Egypt, and one or two other minor points.  Germany, advancing from a victorious position acquired over the Bosnian business, affirmed (in the year 1911) her right to be consulted over the Moroccan settlement.  Nor were the French permitted to occupy Morocco until they had ceded to Germany a portion of their African colony of the Congo.  This transaction was confused by many side issues.  German patriots did not regard it as a sufficient success, though French patriots certainly regarded it as a grave humiliation.  But perhaps the chief consequence of the whole affair was the recrudescence in the French people as a whole of a temper, half forgotten, which provoked them to withstand the now greatly increased power of the German Empire and of its ally, and to determine that if such challenges were to continue unchecked during the coming years, the national position of France would be forfeited.

Following upon this crisis came, in the next year—­still a consequence of the Turkish Revolution—­the sudden determination of the Balkan States, including Greece, to attack Turkey.  It was the King of Montenegro (a small Slav State which had always maintained its independence) who fired the first shot upon the 8th of October, 1912, with his own hand.  In the course of that autumn the Balkan Allies were universally successful, failed only in taking Constantinople itself, reduced Turkey in Europe to an insignificant strip of territory near the capital itself, and proceeded to settle the conquered territory according to an agreement made by them before the outbreak of hostilities.

But here the Germanic Powers again intervened.  The defeated Turkish Army had been trained by German officers upon a German system; the expansion of German and Austrian political military influence throughout the Near East was a cardinal part of the German creed and policy.  Through Austria the Balkans were to be dominated at last, and Austria, at this critical moment, vetoed the rational settlement which the allied Balkan States had agreed to among themselves.  She would not allow the Servians to annex those territories inhabited by men of their race, and to reach their natural outlet to the sea upon the shores of the Adriatic.  She proposed the creation of a novel State of Albania under a German prince, to block Servia’s way to the sea.  She further proposed to Servia compensation by way of Servia’s annexing the territory round Monastir, which had a Bulgarian population, and to Bulgaria the insufficient compensation of taking over, farther to the east, territory that was not Bulgarian at all, but mixed Greek and Turkish.