punitive operations against their great neighbour, if, indeed, they should not side with her. The experience of Serbia and Rumania in the present war is not calculated to encourage small States to incur the hostility of the Central Powers, in reliance on the support of other Powers more remote. In any case the strategical conditions would be more complex than in previous wars, as the plans for the employment of the international police would have to provide for every probable grouping of the Powers. Needless to say, the command of the police would be a thorny question, unity of control being even more difficult to attain than it is now. The limitation of standing armies would cause war again to become mobile; for their expansion during war would be gradual, and the newly-trained troops would appear only as successive reinforcements, entrenchments would be relegated to their old value, as mere adjuncts of the defence; and strategy would resume its former supremacy.

No fallacy could be more absurd, or more fraught with danger, than the assumption-accepted as axiomatic by the Inter-Allied Labour Conference in February-that the settlement of frontiers according to the principle of 'self-determination,' coupled with the establishment of a League of Nations, would eliminate strategical considerations from all international questions. The destruction of the enemy's armed forces, which has proved impracticable in the case of the huge armies of the present day, would again become the primary object of military operations; and, with the small forces which would take the field at the outset, it is quite possible that an initial advantage might prove decisive. To make the frontiers between contiguous States conform to the racial boundaries would be to deliver one into the hands of the other. For example, as some Italian observers have pointed out, the inclusion of Italia Irredenta, without a further readjustment in places, would make the frontier of Italy even more disadvantageous than it was before the war. Weakness invites attack; and to minimise the risk of future wars it would be essential to ensure that no State, great or small, should be at the mercy of its neighbours. The question is a practical one, which cannot be decided offhand by Labour delegates or politicians in accordance with academic dogmas.

Such are the chief military problems which would have to be solved in connexion with the inauguration of a League of Nations; and there are others of a political nature which would tax the ingenuity of politicians and diplomatists. But, regarded as a whole, the problem may not be so impracticable as it appears from the purely military point of view. There are other means besides force, by which the League might assert its authority, chief among which is economic pressure, the power of which has been brought into notice by the war. An embargo on trade, which could be adjusted to various degrees of intensity, from a complete boycott to the prohibition of certain imports, would be a powerful deterrent. Such questions, however, lie beyond the scope of our subject; as do also various political delusions accepted in certain quarters, such as the view that democracies are not pugnacious, and that they will be scrupulous in the observance of treaties. It may, however, be remarked that these assertions are not borne out by the actions of such democratic organisations as Labour combinations, which have not hesitated to coerce non-unionists by force or the threat of force, and have shown little regard for agreements. Nor would it be wise to pin our faith to such phrases as the ' democratisation of Germany,' the 'triumph of internationalism' over patriotism, or or the the destruction of militarism.' The German people, although for three years they have suffered privations many times more severe than ours, appear, on the whole, to have been staunch, loyal, and patriotic; and their political and military systems have stood the stern test of war, and proved extraordinarily efficient. Had it been otherwise, Germany would long since have gone under,' and the Germans are well aware of the fact. Let us not allow ourselves to be deluded by specious catchwords and untried political theories, the truth of which is, to say the least, doubtful. Peace, if it is to be lasting, must rest on surer foundations.

W. P. BLOOD.

Art. 16.-GREECE AND THE BALKAN SETTLEMENT.

IN the October number of the Quarterly Review' appeared an article which advocated a Final Settlement of the Balkans,' 'imposed from above, and maintained under penalties, perhaps even manu militari, for a certain time.' To the friends of Greece and Serbia the very phrase 'settlement from above' is suspect, apart altogether from the terms of such a settlement. They remember that the only time the Balkan States have ever come to an amicable agreement was in the creation of the League of 1912, to which the Great Powers contributed nothing. The League was broken up by the impatience of Bulgaria, but Serbia and Greece effected a compromise that still forms the only solid basis for our hopes of a Balkan Confederation. Who would have thought, ten years ago, that Greece would acquiesce cheerfully in the loss of Monastir, the watchword of its Irredentism, the test case for the argument that town should weigh more than country in determining ethnology? The spirit of that compromise could not be more nobly set forth than in the speech that Venizelos delivered in the Boulé in March 1913 :

'I have a conviction that the partition of the conquered territory will not be made by the military authorities, who have a limited horizon and look at matters from a merely military point of view, nor by the too fervid patriots of this State or that, but by these States' responsible Governments. . . . I hope their patriotism will be so lofty that they will not shrink from such sacrifices as will be inevitable if the partition is to ensure the continuance of the Alliance, even if they are bound to be called traitors by the fervid patriots of their own race.'

Venizelos was at the time speaking of concessions to Bulgaria. Twice in three years he has been willing to make her great concessions; first, at that time, to maintain the Balkan League, and secondly, in the first months of 1915, to recreate the League as an ally of the Entente. By those who cannot conceive of renunciation as a possibility of statecraft it has been argued that Venizelos then admitted the right' of Bulgaria to the Kavalla district west of the Strymon. Mr Alexander Pallis, of

Liverpool, who called Venizelos's attention to a statement of this kind in the English press, received the following telegram from him on Feb. 17 of this year:

'I am painfully surprised at the gross inexactitude of the writer's statement that in June 1915 both before and after the elections in a public speech I stated that Kavalla rightly belongs to Bulgaria. You are aware of the conditions under which in January 1915 I advised the ex-King to sacrifice Kavalla, in order to bring about the joint intervention of all the Balkan States on the side of the Entente, and the important concessions that I insisted upon obtaining in return. But never either before or after the elections of June 1915, either in public or in private, did I support the views I am accused of having supported; indeed, I could not possibly have done so, in face of the fact that before the Balkan wars Kavalla had a population of 13,000 Greeks, 12,000 Musulmans, and not one single Bulgarian, and that after the wars the Greek population had increased to 33,000, owing to the wholesale expulsion from Bulgaria of the Greek inhabitants of Western Thrace, when it fell into the hands of the Bulgars. It was the moderate attitude of the Greek Government, and its wider outlook upon European interest, that prompted me at one time to advise the sacrifice of a town entirely Greek in order to bring about a pan-Balkan intervention on the side of the Entente; and I am convinced that British public opinion will realise with what pain the people of Greece see that there are still in England such impenitent Bulgarophils who would claim from an Ally the cession of her own territory to one of Britain's enemies.'

The writer in the October Quarterly' exposes himself to the same criticism. In assigning to Bulgaria not only the district east of the Strymon, but a strip of territory along the northern frontier from Kilkis to Lake Prespa, he argues that his proposal does not differ materially' from that made by Venizelos in 1913, and that Venizelos 'said to the writer' that, though 'he could not give up Salonika,' 'he was ready to yield the other ports'? What grounds have the writer's proposals behind them other than these alleged 'admissions'? We need not pause over his argument that they show respect to recent European decisions,' when we find him immediately stating that the Treaty of Bucarest is of course defunct.' Why of course? Why should the Treaty

of London and the Protocol of Petrograd have any superior moral validity? For no other reason that we can discover than that they gave advantages to Bulgaria which she lost by her own aggressive Prussianism in the second Balkan war. Her unselfish idealism in the Great War is apparently sufficient atonement to deserve reward.

No less suspect is the argument that 'British and other foreign trade' will be excluded from Macedonia unless its seaports are left in the hands of the State which controls the interior.' If we had any right to settle the Balkans from the point of view of British commercial interests-which we certainly have not-it might be answered that all that is needed for the purpose is a Balkan Customs Union. If we were to take into consideration British interests as a whole, strategical and political as well as commercial, we might add that, while it is true that the turn of events in the Ukraine may possibly make Bulgaria useful to us, there is no doubt whatever that the friendship of Greece, with her harbours and submarine bases, is of vital importance for the control of the Mediterranean. If we abandon Venizelos, we play into the hands of Constantine, who will naturally make the point that Germany guaranteed to Greece her ante-bellum frontiers as the price of neutrality, while we reward alliance with loss of territory.

Two further arguments of the Reviewer may next be considered-the positive argument that the needs of the back-country must be the main consideration in the allocation of seaports, and the negative one that the relative dimensions of the several States matter nothing. How far are they consistent with what is the chief justification for his proposals, that his frontiers are in the main identical with ethnical limits'?

For the Bulgarophil, ethnology is something to be used when it suits Bulgaria, to be brushed aside as irrelevant whenever it proves inconvenient. Practically the whole of the coast of the south-west of the Black Sea, of the Sea of Marmora, and of the Egean is inhabited by Greeks. A seafaring, commercial people, they have been in possession of these towns and villages from time immemorial. In some of them there is a minority, mainly Turkish, slightly Bulgarian. Salonica is the one place where Greeks are less numerous than