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36
BULGARIA IN 1911 [chap. 111.
eyes our unhappy country, so ilJ-prepared to face
them, justified the apprehensions of these statesmen.
Altogether, the crisis of August, 1908 to March, 1909,
marked the end of a policy of compromise between
Russia and Austria, and accentuated the division of
Europe into two directly opposed camps, whilst
complications were to be foreseen in the near future on the
Balkan question—henceforth to be a burning one.
The Balkan statesmen, ever practical and on the
alert, immediately took advantage of the new state of
affairs. They realised that Russian policy would most
certainly wish to avenge the Buchlau trap, and the
thinly disguised German ultimatum of March, 1909; and
that in consequence it was necessary to prepare for
events which might occur—or even to provoke them if
they did not occur with sufficient rapidity.
Moreover the evolution of the new Turkish
Government facilitated these schemes of the Balkan States and
gave fresh impetus to their national aspirations.
Two years had not gone by since the second taking-up
of arms by the Young Turks (in April, 1909, followed by
the final deposing of Abdul-Hamid) when the Ottoman
revolutionaries resumed towards their Christian
fellow-citizens the same policy as that pursued by the " Red
Sultan." First came the horrible massacre of Adana—
said to have been fomented by the partisans of the Old
Regime, but in the repression and punishment of which
the New Regime displayed rather too obvious a
mildness ; then by degrees the Young Turks imagined that
the Christians were becoming too grasping—which was
possibly fairly true—and to check this abuse of liberty
they sought to affirm the superiority, indispensable in
their eyes, of the believing Osmanlis. They did this so
unconstrainedly and with so much impatience that the
Christians were forced to guard their new rights by the
old means of plots and recourse to foreign protection.
Little by little the former state of chaos reappeared in
Macedonia and Thrace, then in Armenia and Syria.
And simultaneously with this metamorphosis of
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