For this Bulgarian nation, so frugal, industrious, persevering and courageous there must be a splendid future. It has all the essential elements of greatness and must overcome in time the misfortunes of the past. If but the Fates will shield Bulgaria for a time from the desperate policy of attempting any new war of revenge or of enterprise, her growing economic strength, her superiority in industry and in application to other peoples of the Peninsula will in time assert themselves, and give her a strong position in the Balkans. CHAPTER XIII THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EUROPE As this book goes to the press there is again war in the Balkans. It is only a little war certainly, as yet confined within the limits of the "autonomous State" of Albania, that quaint creation of the ambitions of Austria and Italy, which in its foundation suggested the custom of one of the old Fiji cannibal tribes--that of keeping alive and fattening a victim whom it was intended to eat. Austria desires the Adriatic shore of the Balkan Peninsula: so does Italy. They cannot agree either to fight out the issue now or to abandon their conflicting ambitions; and they have been responsible for creating "independent Albania," which one of them hopes to devour up in the near future when the other one is in difficulties. This war, small as it now is, threatens, however, to spread to a great one; and though the danger may pass away now for the moment, it is certain that one near day Albania will be the cause of another Balkan war: for it is to kindle that war that she has been brought into existence. Even to-day the position is immediately threatening. The creation of Albania gave to Montenegro, to Servia, and to Greece a serious disappointment. In particular was it a blow to Montenegro, whose heroic little people had through centuries borne the chief brunt of the fighting against the Turk: They rose to where their sovran eagle sails, They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails, And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years, Great Tsernogora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.[2] [2] Tennyson's well-known sonnet.