"Serbia ... must dismiss from her army the officers whom Austria should subsequently name. Those officers had just emerged from a war where they had added lustre to the Serbian arms; they were gallant, brave and efficient. I wonder whether it was their guilt or their efficiency that prompted Austria's action! But, mark you, the officers were not named; Serbia was to undertake in advance to dismiss them from the army, the names to be sent in subsequently. Can you name a country in the world that would have stood that? Supposing Austria or Germany had issued an ultimatum of that kind to this country, saying 'You must dismiss from your Army--and from your Navy--all those officers whom we shall subsequently name.' Well, I think I could name them now. Lord Kitchener would go; Sir John French would be sent away; General Smith-Dorrien would go, and I am sure that Sir John Jellicoe would have to go. And there is another gallant old warrior who would go--Lord Roberts. It was a difficult situation for a small country. Here was a demand made upon her by a great military power that could have put half-a-dozen men in the field for every one of Serbia's men, and that Power was supported by the greatest military Power (Germany) in the world." [4] _Great Britain and the European Crisis_, No. 39. [5] _Great Britain and the European Crisis_, No. 46. [6] _Great Britain and the European Crisis_, No. 82. RUSSIA'S POSITION. Russia's interest in the Balkans was well-known. As late as May 23, 1914, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs had reaffirmed in the Duma the policy of the "Balkans for the Balkans" and it was known that any attack on a Balkan State by any great European power would be regarded as a menace to that policy. The Russians are a Slav people like the Serbians. Serbian independence was one of the results of the Great War which Russia waged against Turkey in 1877. If Serbia was, as the Austrian Ambassador said to Sir E. Grey on July 29, "regarded as being in the Austrian sphere of influence"; if Serbia was to be humiliated, then assuredly Russia could not remain indifferent. It was not a question of the policy of Russian statesmen at Petrograd, but of the deep hereditary feeling for the Balkan populations bred in the Russian people by more than two centuries of development. It was known to the Austrians and to every foreign secretary in Europe, that if the Tsar's Government allowed Serbia to be crushed by Austria, they would be in danger of a revolution in Russia. These things had been, as Sir E. Grey said to Parliament in March, 1913, in discussing the Balkan War, "a commonplace in European diplomacy in the past." They were the facts of the European situation, the products of years of development, tested and retested during the last decade. GERMANY'S POSITION.