So in the following spring Russia declared war against Turkey, and Rumania taking this opportunity to declare her complete independence, sent an army into the field to aid the Russians. The Bulgars, unorganized and untrained as they were, also gave what aid they could, especially in the storming of Shipka Pass, through which the invaders burst out into the plains of Thrace and advanced triumphantly on to the gates of Constantinople. Then the Turks cried for terms, and the famous Treaty of San Stefano, drawn up in the small town by that name just outside the Turkish capital, was the result. By this treaty there would have been created the "Greater Bulgaria," of which the Bulgarians have been dreaming of and fighting for ever since. The Bulgaria of the San Stefano Treaty would have cut the European territories of the sultan in two, and thus effectively dismembered the Ottoman Empire. In addition to a coast line on the Black Sea extending a little farther north, and considerably farther south than Bulgaria now possesses, she would have had a frontage on the Aegean Sea. Practically all of Macedonia, over to the lakes of Ochrida and Prespa, and down to near Saloniki, would have been included; the Vardar and the Struma would have been Bulgarian streams from their sources to their mouths. But by this time the great popular indignation against the Turks had spent itself and the diplomatic machinery of the powers began revolving again. England, who had protested against the Bulgarian atrocities strongest, was the first to veto the plan that was to give all the Bulgarians their independence of Turkey. To Lord Beaconsfield, Disraeli, himself one of a race which has suffered oppression for centuries, and then prime minister of Great Britain, belongs the honor of being the first diplomat to set in motion that intervention by the powers which was to give the Bulgars of Macedonia back into the hands of the Turks. There was a conference of the powers in Berlin, and there it was decided that the Treaty of San Stefano must be revised. The reason was that it was feared that Bulgaria would become merely a Russian province; that through Bulgaria Russia would all but have her hands on the Bosphorus, the aim of all her ambitions. So the Treaty of San Stefano was torn up and the Treaty of Berlin was substituted in its place.