Mürzsteg programme, after a short and precarious existence, came to an untimely end (cf. chap. 12). Serbia and Montenegro, face to face with this new danger which threatened permanently to separate their territories, were beside themselves, and immediately parried with the project, hardly more practicable in view of their international credit, of a Danube-Adriatic railway. In July 1908 the nerves of Europe were still further tried by the Young Turk revolution in Constantinople. The imminence of this movement was known to Austro-German diplomacy, and doubtless this knowledge, as well as the fear of the Pan-Serb movement, prompted the Austrian foreign minister to take steps towards the definitive regularization of his country’s position in Bosnia and Hercegovina—provinces whose suzerain was still the Sultan of Turkey. The effect of the Young Turk coup in the Balkan States was as any one who visited them at that time can testify, both pathetic and intensely humorous. The permanent chaos of the Turkish empire, and the process of watching for years its gradual but inevitable decomposition, had created amongst the neighbouring states an atmosphere of excited anticipation, which was really the breath of their nostrils; it had stimulated them during the endless Macedonian insurrections to commit the most awful outrages against each other’s nationals and then lay the blame at the door of the unfortunate Turk; and if the Turk should really regenerate himself, not only would their occupation be gone, but the heavily-discounted legacies would assuredly elude their grasp. At the same time, since the whole policy of exhibiting and exploiting the horrors of Macedonia, and of organizing guerilla bands and provoking intervention, was based on the refusal of the Turks to grant reforms, as soon as the ultra-liberal constitution of Midhat Pasha, which, had been withdrawn after a brief and unsuccessful run in 1876, was restored by the Young Turks, there was nothing left for the Balkan States to do but to applaud with as much enthusiasm as they could simulate. The emotions experienced by the Balkan peoples during that summer, beneath the smiles which they had to assume, were exhausting even for southern temperaments. Bulgaria, with its characteristic matter-of-factness, was the first to adjust itself to the new and trying situation in which the only certainty was that something decisive had got to be done with all possible celerity. On October 5, 1908, Prince Ferdinand sprang on an astonished continent the news that he renounced the Turkish suzerainty (ever since 1878 the Bulgarian principality had been a tributary and vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, and therefore, with all its astonishingly rapid progress and material prosperity, a subject for commiseration in the kingdoms of Serbia and Greece) and proclaimed the independence of Bulgaria, with himself, as Tsar of the Bulgars, at its head. Europe had not recovered from this shock, still less Belgrade and