A more certain territorial loss to Albania is that of the port of Avlona, which Italy occupied in 1914, and which she assuredly will be allowed to keep. After all, her possession of it is no more unnatural than England’s position at Gibraltar or our own at Panama. Furthermore, it is probable that Italy will receive some kind of mandate from the Allies or from the League of Nations to supervise Albania. It is pretty generally admitted, even by the Albanians themselves, that this nascent and terribly backward state needs a protector; and since our government has been unable to assume that rôle, as the Albanians would have preferred to see us do, both we and they can scarcely object to Italy’s undertaking it. To return to the subject of Greek claims--the main object of Mr. Venizelos’ diplomacy at Paris was the question of Thrace. This was a double-barrelled problem, for it referred both to the territory which fell to Bulgaria in 1913, which we call Western Thrace, and to Eastern Thrace, which means all that is left of Turkey in Europe except Constantinople. Here again we are in a region of statistical chaos and ethnographic nightmares. The racial problems of Thrace are as bad as those of Macedonia--worse in fact, since they are so new and unfamiliar. We know in a general way that throughout both the Thraces Turks, Greeks, and to a less extent Bulgarians are scattered about with a promiscuity that almost defies analysis or conclusions. The racial statistics available--the Turkish census of 1910, the Greek Patriarch’s statistical estimates of 1912, and the Bulgarian census in Western Thrace for 1914--make it a point never to agree on a single item. Religious factors add to the confusion. In Western Thrace there is a large population called the Pomaks: people who are probably Bulgarian in race and speech, but who are Moslems in religion and in their _Weltanschauung_. Ought they to be counted as sterling Bulgarian patriots, as people at Sofia maintain; or rather as Turks, as Constantinople and Athens consider them? Finally, after all the wars, migrations, and massacres of the last eight years, one may well doubt whether any of the three censuses mentioned could claim to represent the existing situation, even assuming that they were honestly made in the first place. At all events, one point in this chaos is tolerably clear. In Eastern Thrace the Greeks have the best claim on the basis of nationality, if one takes as the criterion the situation before the Balkan Wars. Speaking very roughly, they may then have numbered about 400,000, as against some 250,000 Turks and only about 50,000 Bulgarians. Not only did the Greeks hold virtually the entire coast, even on the side of the Black Sea; but in the interior they formed the matrix of this strange agglomeration, in which the Turkish and Bulgarian enclaves were embedded.