Let this system of small Serbian posts be extended over the whole of northern Albania, that is to say, in those districts where the natives are willing to receive them. After all, the Serbs understand these neighbours of theirs. Telephones and roads will be built and eventually the railway along the Drin. The northern Albanians will then, for the first time, be on the high-road towards peace and prosperity; and if the rest of Albania has by then attained to anything like this condition everybody would be glad to see a free and independent Albania. Now what prospect is there of the rest of Albania taking any analogous steps? If the regions which at present submit to Tirana decline to modify their methods, it would seem that warfare between them and their kinsmen to the north and north-east must continue, and that the foundations of a united, free Albania will not yet be laid. One might presume, from their bellicose attitude, that the Tirana Government (extending to and including the town of Scutari) is all against a pacific solution; and if one argues that their attitude would be quite different without the support they receive from Italy, then the Italians would doubtless reply that they have as much right to assist the Tirana Albanians as Yugoslavia has to assist those of the north. But this is not the case. Between Italy and the Albanians there are no such ancient political and economic ties as between the Albanians and the Serbs. The mediæval connection with Venice has left with many Albanians a dolorous memory, for apart from the fact that Venice, as in Dalmatia, was pursuing a merely selfish policy, it was directly due to her that the Turkish Sultan, in the fifteenth century, was able to establish himself in Albania. Thrice his troops had been repelled by those of Skanderbeg when the arrangement was made for them to enter the fortress of Rosafat in Venetian uniforms, and then four hundred years elapsed before the Sultan's standard was pulled down. In recent times the Government of Italy has been furnishing the Shqyptart with schools, and these were not its only acts of benevolence towards that wretched people. They have given schools and rifles and munitions and gold. The Albanians were willing to accept this largesse; but that it forged a link between patron and client, that it conferred on the Italians any rights to occupy the country, they denied, and enforced this denial in 1920 at the point of the bayonet. Mr. H. Goad said in the _Fortnightly Review_ that this remark of mine is quite unhistorical, since Italy, says he, "was in course of withdrawal when certain Albanians, stirred up as usual by Jugo-Slavs, attacked her retreating troops." If the Albanians had only known that Italy, despite her having been, says Mr. Goad, "supremely useful to Albania," had resolved to quit, they would perhaps have let them go with dignity. But if Mr. Goad will read some of the contemporary Italian newspapers he will see that my allusion to the