Bulgaria did not reply within the time specified and the Russian minister was reported too ill to move from Sofia, thus indicating that the diplomats of the great contending powers were still at work in an effort to secure the important support of Bulgaria in the Balkan campaign which was imminent.

The treaties have compelled the vanquished countries to destroy or to surrender their navies, and have reduced the standing armies of Germany to 100,000 men, including officers, of Bulgaria to 23,000, of Austria to 30,000 (in reality only 21,000), of Hungary to 35,000.

On the following day, October 9, Belgrade, the former Serbian capital, was occupied by Austro-German forces and the invasion of Serbia by Austria and Germany from the north and by Bulgaria from the east began in earnest.

On November 26, M. Pachitch, the Serbian premier, received a personal telegram from the Russian emperor, in which the latter promised the early appearance in Bulgaria of Russian troops and the Italian government also promised the Serbians to send to their aid an expeditionary force of 40,000 men.

Fifty thousand Servians, two divisions, were spared after Kumanova, and speeded across Bulgaria on the single-line railway with an amazing rapidity to assist, according to plan, the Bulgars in the investment operations.

The Byzantine Church greatly increased its influence in Bulgaria during his reign, and works of theology grew like mushrooms.

The one unanswerable argument of the Serbs in declining to surrender Macedonia was the plea that they would then have nothing to offer Bulgaria for her neutrality or her support when their own inevitable day of reckoning with Austria should arrive.

It was accentuated by the fact that King Milan was little better than an Austrian agent, the most notorious example of this being the ill-considered and ill-managed war with Bulgaria into which he plunged Serbia at the instigation of the Ballplatz(1885).

The same year an attempt was made to bring the Church of Bulgaria under that of Rome, but, owing to Russian opposition, proved abortive.

The whole Southern Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary were carried off their feet by a wave of enthusiasm for the allies, and an impossibly strained situation was reached when the Government of Vienna placed itself in violent conflict with Serbia, vetoed her expansion to the sea, insisted upon creating a phantom Albanian State, egged on Bulgaria against her allies, and finally mobilised in order to impose its will upon the Serbs.

But when a month's campaign changed the war from one of liberation to one of conquest, Roumania demanded from Bulgaria as the price of neutrality Silistria and a small slice of the Black Sea coast sufficient to satisfy strategic military demands.

This assignment of territory conquered from Turkey had the effect of shutting out Bulgaria from the Western Aegean; and the littoral left to Bulgaria between the Mesta River and the Turkish boundary has no harbor of any consequence but Dedeagach, which is much inferior to Kavala.

The two committees of Odessa and Bucarest which promoted the enlightenment and emancipation of Bulgaria were dissimilar in composition and in aim; the members of the former were more intent on educational and religious reform, and aimed at the gradual and peaceful regeneration of their country by these means; the latter wished to effect the immediate political emancipation of Bulgaria by violent and, if necessary, warlike means.

And her extrusion from the Adriatic threw her back toward the Aegean, with the result of shutting Bulgaria out of Central Macedonia, which was annexed by Greece and Servia presumably under arrangements satisfactory to the latter for an outlet to the sea at Saloniki.

Yet, without the conquest of Constantinople, Russia could never carry the idea of Pansclavism: for in European Turkey a vast stock of the Sclavonic race dwells, from Bulgaria over Servia and Bosnia down to Montenegro, and across through Rumelia.

The policy of Bulgaria at the conference was to satisfy the demands of Roumania at once, sign a separate treaty which would rid her territory of Roumanian troops, and then treat with Greece and Servia.

The triumph of the Greeks was complete, and it can be imagined that there was not much left of the earthenware Bulgaria after the violent collision of these two mighty iron vessels on the top of it.