Equality of right among nations, small as well as great, is one of the fundamental issues that this country and her allies are fighting to establish in this war.... We feel that government by consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement.... A territorial settlement must be secured, based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed. CHAPTER VIII THE BALKAN SETTLEMENT AND ITS EFFECT UPON BULGARIA AND ALBANIA If the Paris Conference had in mind a durable peace, no problem ought to have received more careful and judicial attention than that of the Balkan settlement. Since the first revolts against Turkish rule in Serbia and the War of Greek Independence, a hundred years of unsettled political condition in southeastern Europe had passed. It had become a truism that the conflicts among the powers began in the Balkans. Serbia’s difficulties with Austria-Hungary had precipitated the World War. But the causes of the war went back deep into the roots of Balkan history, long before either Germany or Italy played leading rôles in the councils of the great powers. What the Balkan peoples had sorely needed, in their bloody struggle for freedom from the Ottoman yoke, was non-interference of the great powers in their internal affairs and their relations among themselves. But this they had never enjoyed. Disinterested friendship was not shown to the Balkan peoples in their fight for emancipation. They were encouraged to seek backing from powerful European states, and then, when they had done this, they provoked the enmity of the powers who were rivals of their actual or supposed backers. In the game for political and economic influence in the Balkans, the great powers were accustomed to use the little Balkan peoples as pawns. Thus they were set against each other. When they became independent states their boundaries were not fixed by mutual compromises but by the great powers. Thus they were not allowed a normal political evolution. It was hoped that the World War had taught the powers a lesson, and that they would have become converted to the idea of a “live and let live” policy for the Balkans, attainable only by a “hands off” policy on the part of the great powers. Experts in Balkan affairs knew that the three great problems of the Balkans--Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania--had not been solved by the Balkan wars and the Treaties of London and Bucharest. The Turks were still in Thrace. Macedonia had not been equitably divided. The frontiers of Albania had not been fixed. It was hoped that the bitter experiences of the World War would demand of the peacemakers a courageous and far-seeing solution of these problems.