This, then, is the future country of Albania, which--if one is rash enough to prophesy--may exist in fifty years. But there is no risk whatever in asserting that a free, united Albania is in the immediate future quite impossible. 13. EUROPEAN MEASURES AGAINST THE YUGOSLAVS AND THEIR FRIENDS Berati Beg, Tirana's delegate in Paris, said in an interview with a representative of the Belgrade _Pravda_, at the beginning of November 1921, that he regretted that European diplomats should interfere in the Serbo-Albanian question. "Are we not all," said he, "one large Balkan family? And if the Powers intervene they will not act in our interests, but in their own." He said that it used to be Austria which grasped at Albania, now it was Italy. So the delegate showed that he was a clear-sighted man; he also showed that in Tirana they are not unanimous in loving the Italians. But alas! the Great Powers, urged by Italy, made a most disastrous plunge; they actually, at least Great Britain, charged the Serbs, their allies, on November 7, with being guilty of overstepping the frontier, and on November 9 informed them where this frontier was. It is a pity that Mr. Lloyd George should have launched such a thunderbolt, the French Government not being consulted.[99] But the most probable explanation of this lack of courtesy towards the Serbs, and lack of the most elementary justice, is that the Prime Minister, with his numerous preoccupations, allowed some incapable person to act in his name.[100] The world was told, however, that Mr. Lloyd George had sent a peremptory demand for the convocation of the Council of the League of Nations so that a sanction should be applied against the Yugoslavs. Mr. Lloyd George's substitute was so little versed in the business that he did not even know that the League of Nations is not a gendarme to carry out the decisions of the Ambassadors' Conference. He should have been aware of the fact that this was a problem for the Allied States, to be settled by diplomatic or other measures, and he should also have known that the League of Nations does not--except if invited to arbitrate--concern itself with the unliquidated problems left by the War, such as the Turkish question. Perhaps that dangerous confusion in the mind of this unknown official would not have occurred if Albania had not been illogically admitted to the League of Nations. But now, in November 1921, not an instant was to be lost in settling this frontier question, which--as the _Temps_ pointed out--would have been settled months before if Italy had not prevented it. (She wished as a preliminary step to have certain claims of her own in regard to Albania conceded.) So the Council of the League was to be invited to apply Article 16, which could scarcely be invoked unless Article 15, which defines a procedure of conciliation, had been found of no avail.[101] Thus the misguided person who spoke in the name of Mr. Lloyd George was apparently too impetuous to read the texts.