Consider the difference between that arrangement and the attractions provided by the Entente. Russia, France and Britain could deal only in counters, not in hard cash like their adversaries. The utmost they were able to offer was an undertaking to use their good offices with Serbia and Greece to obtain the promise of a part of Bulgaria's demands. And the fulfilment of this promise would of necessity be conditional on the victory of the Allies. As for the weakening of Serbia, it could not be entertained. On the contrary, that State, according to the Entente scheme, would be greatly enlarged, would, in fact, become by far the greatest of the Balkan nations. And for this shadowy lure, Bulgaria was expected to meet in deadly encounter the greatest military empires the world has ever seen, and to meet them without the help of any of the Great Powers of the Entente. One has but to compare these two alternatives in order to realize that, even if Ferdinand had entered into no binding compact with Austria and Germany, he would not hesitate a moment between them. Personally and politically he was held tight by the Teuton tentacles. The currency of the notion that with these competing offers before him, a crafty statesman like Ferdinand who felt over and above that Russia's vengeance was hanging over his head, would take what he believed was the losing side, shows a degree of _naivete_ which cannot be qualified without epithets which it had better be understood than expressed. Looking back upon the results of the first twenty months of the war and upon the more obvious causes to which they may fairly be ascribed, one is struck less forcibly by the military and economic unpreparedness of the Allies for the inevitable conflict than by their inaccessibility to the ground ideas on which Germany set her hopes of success. The two groups of belligerents stood intellectually on different planes. The Teuton's faith was implicit in the law of causality, in the necessity of contemplating the vast problem as a whole, of adjusting means to ends, of co-operation at home and co-ordination of means abroad. The methods of the Allies were drawn from a limited range of experience which was no longer applicable to the new conditions, and their hopes rested on a series of isolated exertions put forth temporarily under stress of exceptional pressure.