Evidently the urgent need to create kingdoms or confederations larger than any such single States as the natural map supplies, is manifest to both sides.  If Germany, Italy and Russia can come to any sort of general agreement in these matters, their arrangements will be a matter of secondary importance to the Western Allies—­saving our duty to Serbia and Montenegro and their rulers.  Russia may not find the German idea of a Polish plus Bohemian border State so very distasteful, provided that the ruler is not a German; Germany may find the idea still tolerable if the ruler is not the Tsar.

The destiny of the Serbo-Croatian future lies largely in the hands of Italy and Bulgaria.  Bulgaria was not in this war at the beginning, and she may not be in it at the end.  Her King is neither immortal nor irreplaceable.  Her desire now must be largely to retain her winnings in Macedonia, and keep the frontier posts of a too embracing Germany as far off as possible.  She has nothing to gain and much to fear from Roumania and Greece.  Her present relations with Turkey are unnatural.  She has everything to gain from a prompt recovery of the friendship of Italy and the sea Powers.  A friendly Serbo-Croatian buffer State against Germany will probably be of equal comfort in the future to Italy and Bulgaria; more especially if Italy has pushed down the Adriatic coast along the line of the former Venetian possessions.  Serbia has been overrun, but never were the convergent forces of adjacent interests so clearly in favour of her recuperation.  The possibility of Italy and that strange Latin outlier, Roumania, joining hands through an allied and friendly Serbia must be very present in Italian thought.  The allied conception of the land route from the West and America to Bagdad and India is by Mont Cenis, Trieste, Serbia and Constantinople, as their North European line to India is through Russia by Baku.

And that brings us to Constantinople.

Constantinople is not a national city; it is now, and it has always been, an artificial cosmopolis, and Constantinople and the Dardanelles are essentially the gate of the Black Sea.  It is to Russia that the waterway is of supreme importance.  Any other Power upon it can strangle Russia; Russia, possessing it, is capable of very little harm to any other country.

Roumania is the next most interested country.  But Roumania can reach up the Danube and through Bulgaria, Serbia or Hungary to the outer world.  Her greatest trade will always be with Central Europe.  For generations the Turks held Thrace and Anatolia before they secured Constantinople.  The Turk can exist without Constantinople; he is at his best outside Constantinople; the fall of Constantinople was the beginning of his decay.  He sat down there and corrupted.  His career was at an end.  I confess that I find a bias in my mind for a Russian ownership of Constantinople.  I think that if she does not get it now her gravitation towards it in the future