As to Turkey, her fortunes shrank steadily. At the end of the Balkan War she retained only 1,900,000 subjects in Europe, inhabitants of the district around Adrianople. She was becoming a distinctly Asiatic power, and the sultan must have felt that his hold on Constantinople was precarious. At the same time, as we shall see later on, Great Britain had secured a foothold on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and Russia was extending her influence in Persia, two threats from the eastward. Any far sighted Turk could see that his country was in danger of being crushed in a vise of foreign aggression. To which of the great states should Turkey turn for that protection which had long been her safety? Not to Russia, whose ambition was for Constantinople itself, nor to Great Britain, who seemed to desire the Euphrates Valley, and who was safely established in Egypt. In her extremity she listened to the suggestions of German wooers, who promised industrial development, railroads, and financial aid. Here was laid the foundation of Turko-German sympathy which was to be very important in the Great War. After a calamity has occurred it is easy to point out the course by which it might have been avoided. It seems certain that if we stood again where the world stood in 1914 we should not do what we did in 1914. So we can see in what respects the events of the Balkan history went wrong. But the men who settled the crises of the past were not able to see what we see. They had the same blindness for the future that we have for that which lies before us now. They fumbled their problems as most men fumble problems, as we shall, perhaps, go on fumbling until the end of time. It is asking much to expect that statesmen shall be as wise as we who review their deeds. But there are great facts in history which it is possible to know and use with profit. One of them is the incompetency of the principle of the Concert of Europe to deal with a situation like that we have reviewed in the Balkans. Concert predicates a group of satisfied great states, without over-reaching ambitions, who are willing to unite their efforts to restrain small states, or even one large state, from a course which shall force the rest of the world into conflict. When a group of great states have united to carry out a certain policy, and another tries to restrain the first group, concert is in great danger of breaking down. That was the situation in the Balkans. These states were drawn into the whirl of general European politics, and they intensified its velocity at one particular corner, so that what may be contemplated as a harmonious rotary movement broke into a twisting tornado. If, when the present war is over, the nations of the world undertake to go on under the old system, trusting to concert as the means of avoiding war, there is no reason to expect that the future will be less turbulent than the past. CHAPTER VII GERMAN IDEALS AND ORGANIZATION