and Austria and produce a European conflagration. General Fadejew, in a celebrated pamphlet [Footnote: General Fadejew, _Über Russland's Kriegsmacht und Kriegspolitik_, Leipzig, 1870, translated from the Russian.] which fluttered all the Chancelleries of Europe in the early seventies, had said that the road from Russia to Constantinople lay through Vienna; and Vienna, Sir Charles agreed with the Russian general, was the centre to be watched, for it was there that the key of European policy was to be found. 'Austria interests me,' he wrote, when preparing his book, to Sir William White, the Ambassador at Constantinople. 'I can't leave London, but I'm thinking of sending a man to Vienna to tell me certain things. If so, to whom should he go?' And he watched the strange development of events in Bulgaria. Early in January he notes an interview with 'Dr. Stoiloff, the ablest man except the brutal Stambuloff, and the leader of the Conservative party' in Bulgaria, where the perpetual intrigues of Russian agents, official and unofficial, had recently culminated, in August, 1886, in the kidnapping of the reigning chief of the State, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and had thereby created an Austrian party: events which were to have many long-drawn-out consequences, as the following century to its own cost was to find out. Bulgaria from this time began to move in an orbit of her own, distinct from, and often unfriendly to, the other Balkan States. In 1887 it was still a current belief--especially on the part of many of Sir Charles's own political friends--that Germany was eagerly watching for an opportunity to seize the German provinces of Austria, and that Austria was eagerly watching for an opportunity 'to go to Salonica,' as the current phrase had it. The two propositions were almost mutually destructive, but, without insisting on this rather obvious consideration, Sir Charles was well aware that (even apart from reasons of international policy) Germany could not desire the disruption of Austria, because the German provinces of Upper and Lower Austria and Styria did not lie next to North Germany, but were cut off from it by countries in which the most enterprising of all Slavonic peoples--the Czechs of Bohemia--'hated the Germans with a deadly hatred,' and already, even in 1887, had got the upper hand. Count Bismarck himself had resisted--and successfully--the desire of the military party to annex Bohemia in 1866 after Sadowa. The permanent exclusion of Austria and the House of Hapsburg from Germany was also no sudden or ephemeral policy. In the middle of the seventeenth century, as the author of the _Holy Roman Empire_ had reminded his readers, it had been proposed by the famous publicist Philippe Chemnitz, who wrote under the name of 'Hippolytus à Lapide,' as the surest means of securing a permanent unity of some kind in Germany. [Footnote: See Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, chap. xx., p. 386; Louis Léger, _Histoire de l'Autriche-Hongrie_, chap.