Note 47 — Chapter III · ROMA NOVA

Beaconsfield boasted on his return from Berlin to England that he had secured “peace with honor.” McGahan, the brilliant war correspondent, declared as soon as he read the treaty, that “it was not worth the paper on which it was written.” An English writer, forty years later, stigmatized it as a treaty that “was concluded in a spirit of shameless bargain, with a sublime disregard of elementary ethics and in open contempt of the right of civilized peoples to determine their own future. It was essentially a temporary arrangement concluded between rival imperialist states. And it sowed the seeds of the crop of ‘Nationalist’ wars in which the Balkan peoples were to be embroiled for the next half century.” The Turks in Europe, p. 179 (by W. E. D. Allen, London, 1919).