BALKAN CRISIS OF 1912 7 



prepared to see in her hands. On November 23rd M. Pashitch, the Servian Premier, 

 issued a statement to the Press, of which the crucial portion was as follows: 



"Servian arms have conquered far more territory than Servia intends to retain, but 

 Servian policy has established a minimum of territorial expansion which does no more than 

 cover her conationals and her national necessities. For this minimum Servia is prepared 

 to make every sacrifice, since not to do so would be to be false to her national duty. No 

 Servian statesman or Government dare betray the future welfare of the country by consider- 

 ing for a moment even the abandonment of this minimum. Servia's minimum requisite to 

 her national development is economic independence, save, possibly, in so far as regards a 

 Customs union with her allies and a free and adequate passage to the Adriatic Sea on the 

 Adriatic coast. It is essential that Servia should possess about 50 kilometres from Alessio 

 to Durazzo. This coastline would be joined to what was formerly Old Servia approximately 

 by the territory between a line from Durazzo to Ochrida Lake in the south and one from 

 Alessio to Djakova in the north." 



So flagrant a defiance of Austria's susceptibilities made European diplomacy in the 

 interests of non-intervention and peace a matter of the greatest difficulty. Moreover 

 Austrian public opinion was stirred up during November by reports of Servian ill-treat- 

 ment of the Austrian consul at Prisrend, Herr Prochaska; for some time his whereabouts 

 was not known, and it was even suggested that he had been killed. Eventually he was 

 found to be unharmed, and the truth appears to be that he had himself acted with great 

 indiscretion. By the middle of December the Prochaska affair had ceased to trouble, 

 but so long as the worst of the tension lasted between Austria and Servia over the Alban- 

 ian question it was used by the Austrian Press Bureau as a method of exciting anti- 

 Servian feeling. The consequence was that at the end of November Austria made 

 open preparations for emergencies by establishing a military censorship and taking other 

 preliminary steps for mobilisation ; and Russia was forced, for this reason, to strengthen 

 her forces at the same time, since the Austrian mobilisation was clearly directed against 

 the possibility of Russia feeling bound to give effect to her sympathies with Servia. 



The Albanian question was in any case certain to be, for some time to come, the least 

 " tractable " of all the problems in the new territorial settlement; but the advance of 

 such extreme Servian pretensions at this stage was discountenanced even by those Pow- 

 ers who were prepared to see a considerable extension of Servian territory, including a 

 sufficient access, for commercial purposes, to the Adriatic. In view of inevitable later 

 developments it should be noticed that, apart altogether from considerations of political 

 expediency, the full Servian demand as put forward by M. Pashitch, and justified by 

 him on ethnological and historical grounds, might well appear an exaggerated one to 

 an impartial student of the international question. According to M. Pashitch " about 

 10 per cent of the 150,000 inhabitants " of the territory claimed were Servian; " more 

 than half the Albanians are Christians; observers such as Hahn and Baldacci admit that 

 the Albanians in the district" (i.e. the northern half) " are of ancient Servian origin," 

 and so forth. This is not borne out by the article on Albania in the Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica (i, 481 et seq.), which is perhaps the most authoritative independent account 

 available, from first-hand knowledge, of the country and its inhabitants. Moreover it 

 is in direct conflict with the careful analysis of the ethnological position in Albania given 

 in the London Times of November 25th; writing from Constantinople on November i2th 

 (before M. Pashitch published his manifesto), the Times correspondent gave the fol- 

 lowing facts with regard to the territory in question. 



" In the Vilayet of Skutari there is one Slav village that of Vraka, near Skutari. Gusinje 

 is inhabited by a majority of Albanians. The balance of its population is composed of 

 Mahommedan Slavs. In the Novi Bazar region, though the Kazas (counties) of Akova 

 (Bielopolye) and Kolashin are mainly Albanian, the majority of the population is Christian 

 Slav with a fair proportion of "Bosniaks" (Moslem Serbs). Leaving this important tongue 

 of land, we come to Ipek. In the entire Kaza (county) of Ipek there are, according to the 

 best ethnological map of the district the work of neither Serb nor Albanian, Austrian, or 

 Turk 42 villages inhabited exclusively by Serbs, 123 villages inhabited by Albanians, 

 Moslem and Catholic, 44 "mixed" villages inhabited by Moslem Albanians, Catholic 

 Albanians, and Serbs, and the "mixed" town of Ipek. Allowing for the proportion of Serbs 

 and Albanians in the "mixed" villages and in Ipek as being equal, and assuming, as do 

 Turkish census reports, that a house represents five souls, one finds that the inhabitants of 



