beyond her own frontier she still depends on Serbia’s good-will, just, as Serbia depends on hers for an outlet to the Aegean at Salonika.  The two states have provided for their respective interests by a joint proprietorship of the section of railway between Salonika and Belgrade; and similar railway problems will doubtless bring Rumania to terms with Serbia for access to the Adriatic, and both with Bulgaria for rights of way to Constantinople and the Anatolian hinterland beyond.  These common commercial arteries of the Balkans take no account of racial or political frontiers, but link the region as a whole with other regions in a common economic relation.

South-eastern and central Europe are complementary economic areas in a special degree.  The industries of central Europe will draw upon the raw products of the south-east to an increasing extent, and the south-east will absorb in turn increasing quantities of manufactured plant from central Europe for the development of its own natural resources.  The two areas will become parties in a vast economic nexus, and, as in all business transactions, each will try to get the best of the continually intensified bargaining.  This is why co-operation is so essential to the future well-being of the Balkan States.  Isolated individually and mutually competitive as they are at present, they must succumb to the economic ascendancy of Vienna and Berlin as inevitably as unorganized, unskilled labourers fall under the thraldom of a well-equipped capitalist.  Central Europe will have in any event an enormous initial superiority over the Balkans in wealth, population, and business experience; and the Balkan peoples can only hope to hold their own in this perilous but essential intercourse with a stronger neighbour, if they take more active and deliberate steps towards co-operation among themselves, and find in railway conventions the basis for a Balkan zollverein.  A zollverein should be the first goal of Balkan statesmanship in the new phase of history that is opening for Europe; but economic relations on this scale involve the political factor, and the Balkans will not be able to deal with their great neighbours on equal terms till the zollverein has ripened into a federation.  The alternative is subjection, both political and economic; and neither the exhaustion of the Central Powers in the present struggle nor the individual consolidation of the Balkan States in the subsequent settlement will suffice by themselves to avert it in the end.

The awakening of the nation and the consolidation of the state, which we have traced in these pages, must accordingly lead on to the confederation of the Balkans, if all that has been so painfully won is not to perish again without result; and we are confronted with the question:  Will Balkan nationalism rise to the occasion and transcend itself?