RUSSIA'S POSITION.

Russia's interest in the Balkans was well-known. As late as May 23, 1914, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs had reaffirmed in the Duma the policy of the "Balkans for the Balkans" and it was known that any attack on a Balkan State by any great European power would be regarded as a menace to that policy. The Russians are a Slav people like the Serbians. Serbian independence was one of the results of the Great War which Russia waged against Turkey in 1877. If Serbia was, as the Austrian Ambassador said to Sir E. Grey on July 29, "regarded as being in the Austrian sphere of influence"; if Serbia was to be humiliated, then assuredly Russia could not remain indifferent. It was not a question of the policy of Russian statesmen at Petrograd, but of the deep hereditary feeling for the Balkan populations bred in the Russian people by more than two centuries of development. It was known to the Austrians and to every foreign secretary in Europe, that if the Tsar's Government allowed Serbia to be crushed by Austria, they would be in danger of a revolution in Russia. These things had been, as Sir E. Grey said to Parliament in March, 1913, in discussing the Balkan War, "a commonplace in European diplomacy in the past." They were the facts of the European situation, the products of years of development, tested and retested during the last decade.