ABSTRACT
THE Turks were induced to sign the treaty of Lausanne by the knowledge that another struggle was impending. The Balkan peninsula had remained comparatively quiet during the greater part of the Libyan war; but in August, 1912, symptoms of the coming storm began to manifest themselves. Sanguinary incidents occurred on the Montenegrin frontier, ca\}sing the Turkish minister to quit Cetinje; there were massacres at Berane in the sanJ"ak and at Kotchana in Macedonia; and this latter outrage, following a previous massacre of the Bulgars at Ishtip, provoked the demand for war throughout Bulgaria. The grant of a sort of administrative autonomy to Albania was a blow to the national aspirations of the four Balkan states in the proposed autonon10US territory. Servia complained that the Turks had seized her munitions of war in transit, Greece that a Greek vessel had been subject to violence in the port of Samos, while Bulgaria saw a menace in the Turkish manoeuvres in Thrace. In vain Count Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, sent a circular to the other Powers on August 14, inviting their opinion on the desirability of advising Turkey to adopt a programme of decentralisation and the Balkan states to adopt a policy of moderation. Diplomacy was powerless to check the movement when once the four Balkan kingdoms, forgetting their mutual jealousies, united against the common enemy
The dream of Rhegas was at last a reality; a Balkan League was formed against the Turks. The authorship of this
499 marvellous work, hitherto the despair of statesmen, although attempted by Trikot1pes in 1891, has been ascribed chiefly to M. Venizelos. Fortunately at that moment each of the four allied states was governed by a man of character, while the negotiations were conducted with such secrecy that neither Turks nor European diplomatists suspected what was coming.
