The malignity of William II.’s Government towards France, and its indulgence towards those who sowed bad feeling in the country, as if to reap a harvest of hate, were nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the persistent legend regarding the cruel treatment of German soldiers in the French Foreign Legion. Nothing would have been easier than officially to deny these alleged barbarities, as well as the reports of press-gang methods employed by agents of that famous corps in Germany—in short, to silence the canting protests to which its existence gave rise. Not only did the Government omit to do this, but it even tolerated, until a formal complaint was laid, the production in a Berlin theatre of a play in which the French uniform of the legionaries was held up to ridicule. One might have compared the Foreign Legion to a poisoned lancet, kept by the authorities for the purpose of envenoming, when it pleased them, their intercourse with France. VII. While these dangerous frictions were the chief cause of anxiety to all who, like myself, felt that the peace of Europe hung upon Franco-German relations, it seems that at this period the attention of the European public was drawn rather to the grave events enacted in the Balkan theatre soon after the Treaty of London signed on 30th May. A new conflict was brewing in that quarter. As in previous cases, the efforts to localize it were successful, but it left behind it a leaven of spite and hatred that went on fermenting silently throughout the winter, until in the following summer it helped to produce a universal war. A very heavy share of the responsibility for the second Balkan struggle falls to Austrian diplomacy. Austria could not resign herself to the inevitable and put up with the neighbourhood of a Serbia enhanced in power and prestige. The wrangles of the Confederates over the partition of Macedonia gave her the chance for which she had been waiting since the Ottoman disasters. It was she—there is no longer any doubt on this point—that instigated Bulgaria to attack her recent allies, promising to secure the inaction of Roumania. It never occurred to her that she was thus sacrificing a staunch ally who occupied an outpost on the Lower Danube, an island of Western culture in the sea of Slavdom; that the future of Roumania would be seriously jeopardized if Bulgaria became too strong. We have since learnt from M. Take Jonescu that her mouthpiece at Bucharest, Prince Karl von Fürstenberg, even went so far as to bluster, in order to ensure that Roumanian troops should not intervene. It was all lost labour. The Austrian calculations were entirely thrown out of gear by the victories of the Greeks and Serbians and by their alliance with Roumania.