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in the Balkans, and was shut back on her mountains, as it seemed
irrevocably. Servia and Greece were left with almost as serious
grievances. Albania therefore is a constant source of temptation to
a war of enterprise on the part of three of the Balkan nations, and
the war only awaits a favourable opportunity to break out: a pretext
for it can always be supplied at a day’s notice by some border
collision with the wild and lawless Albanian clans. Should the war in
Albania spread to her neighbours, Bulgaria, outraged and mortified
by the Treaty of Bucharest and again robbed and humiliated by
Turkish encroachments on her powerlessness after that Treaty, in all
probability will seize the opportunity to make a war of requital on
some one of her neighbours, and the Balkan Peninsula will then be
again drenched in blood. There will be again a cry of shocked horror
from Western Europe as to these “quarrelsome and bloodthirsty”
Balkan peoples. But in fair play and justice there is more reason for
the little Balkan peoples to be shocked and horrified at the coldblooded
policy of the Great Powers who, for their own ends, create
conditions which make peace in the Balkans impossible.
The truth is that these little shreds of peoples, in the blood-soaked
Peninsula which destiny marked out to be the great battle-ground
of races, have been used as pawns in the great game of European
diplomacy ever since the fall of Napoleon. It will be recalled that
one of the earlier dreams of that ambitious genius was to enter the
service of the Sublime Porte and reorganise the power of Turkey.
The crumbling away of the power of the Turkish Empire, which
had given centuries of anxiety to Christian Europe, was at that time
apparent. A great genius might then have restored the fighting
power and the prestige of Islam. But Napoleon turned to other work
and Turkey went on decaying. There soon arose a question as to
who should be the legatee of the “Sick Man of Europe,” and legacy
hunters, some fawning, some clamorous, gathered at his bedside.
To some of these it soon occurred that there would be wisdom in
hastening the process of division, and that a means to do this was to
question the moral right of the Turk to the Christian provinces over
which he ruled. In the state of public feeling in Europe at the time
it was most convenient to question this right on the ground of the
religious intolerance of the Turk.
Without joining the party of the “pro-Turks” it is clear that that
ground was more of a pretext than a reality. The Turk is not a
religious persecutor to anything like the extent to which the Christian
has been a religious persecutor. On coming into Europe he never
sought, for example, to destroy the Greek Church, and I do not think
that there is any clear evidence that Turkish misrule was founded
at any period on intolerance carried to the degree of murder for
faith’s sake. The fault rather of the Porte’s rule was the dreadful
corruption and incompetence of the Turk as an administrator and
the Turkish ideas of the status of women-folk—ideas which gave to
Moslem women rights derived from their Moslem men-relatives, but
regarded Christian women as if they were cattle without owners.
I think that it was the adoption by European Powers of religion
as a pretext for interfering in the Balkans which has been largely
responsible for the religious bitterness there. It would make the
situation more clear and give a better hope for the future if Western
Europe would frankly recognise that the fervid interest taken in
the Balkan Peninsula for about a century has had no other reason
generally than territory-hunger.
When Turkey began showing signs of falling to pieces, Russia
made an early claim to the succession of “the Sick Man’s” estate.
Russia wanted a warm water-port; and her territories would have
been nicely rounded off by the acquisition of Turkey in Europe.
These were the real reasons, not publicly expressed, for her Balkan
policy. Less real reasons, kept in the foreground, were that the head
of the Russian Orthodox Church was at Constantinople, that Russia
was the kinsman of the Slav populations in the Balkans, and that
her duty and right was to liberate co-religionists who were suffering
from religious persecution.
Great Britain was the great obstacle to the desire of Russia to
march down upon Constantinople. Her real objection was that with
Russia on the Bosphorus the control of the Mediterranean might
pass into the hands of the rival who seemed to wish to dispute with
her for the mastery of India. Her expressed reasons had some vague
declarations about the “chivalry of the Turk.” Austria developed
her ambition to suzerainty over the Balkan Peninsula mainly on the
strength of a claim to be the heir of the old Holy Roman Empire, and
as such possessing an hereditary right to rule over the old seat of
that Empire in the East. Italy was forced into a Balkan policy by the
impossibility of allowing a rival Power to settle on the other side of
the Adriatic, threatening her whole east coast. Germany and France
came into Balkan politics chiefly as allies of Powers with more direct
interests, although both have now fears and hopes regarding the
Asiatic dominions of the Sublime Porte and shape their Balkan policy
accordingly.