friends in England, was still unwilling to surrender old friends in Austria, and so he is found discussing with them, to our great disadvantage, new schemes conceived under new international conjunctures. The possibility of the final downfall of Turkey, the possibility of the advance of Austria-Hungary to Salonica and of Russia on the Bosphorus, were the subjects of secret discussion on the former lines. But at the same time new developments took place, and two facts in particular must be remembered as outward symptoms of the changing situation.
First, in June, 1903, a new dynasty appeared in Serbia, the dynasty of Peter Karageorgevic, which was friendly to Russia, and then there began a bitter struggle for the emancipation of Serbia from the economic bondage of Austria. A Russophil Radical party, under the leadership of Mr Paschic, took a line which entirely changed the whole situation. It was then that Austria began to talk about the Serbian danger. Then, secondly. Baron Aerenthal, the Austrian Foreign Minister, on the 27th of January, 1908, made his famous speech about the new railway line to be constructed through Sanjak,—through the corridor I have mentioned,—and he particularly emphasised the importance of that railway as a means of direct communication between Vienna, Egypt, and India. This speech was an open avowal, and from that moment the Eastern Question was reopened in all its historical magnitude and significance. Under this new light the annexation by Austria-Hungary of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 received a meaning quite different from what it was supposed to have in 1876, at the time of
