war,
and in fact owed his life to that country which he has since done so
much to ruin.

The pieces on the Balkan chessboard then stood thus: A Serbia which
was the most bitter enemy of Bulgaria and whose King was
Austrophile.

A violently pro-Russian Montenegro, filled with contempt for the
beaten Serbs, and ruled by a Prince who regarded himself confidently
as the God-appointed restorer of Great Serbia, and who was openly
supporting his new son-in-law, the rival claimant to the Serb
throne.

The throne of Serbia, never too stable, now rocked badly. King Milan
declared that Pan-Slavism was the enemy of Serbia and he was
certainly right. For in those days it would have simply meant
complete domination by Russia--the great predatory power whose maw
has never yet been filled.

He pardoned Pashitch, thinking possibly it was better to come to
terms with him than to have him plotting in an enemy country,
Pashitch returned as head of the Radical party and Serbia became a
hot-bed of foul and unscrupulous intrigue into which we need not dig
now.

Between the partisans of Russia and Austria, Serbia was nearly torn
in half. After incessant quarrels with his Russian wife, Milan in
1888 divorced her--more or less irregularly--and in the following
year threw up the game and abdicated in favour of his only
legitimate child, the ill-fated Alexander who was then but fourteen.

Torn this way and that by his parents' quarrels, brought up in the
notoriously corrupt court of Belgrade and by nature, according to
the accounts of those who knew him, of but poor mental calibre,
Alexander is, perhaps, to be as much pitied as blamed. His nerves,
so Mr. Chedo Miyatovitch told me, never recovered from the shock of
a boating accident when young. He was the last and decadent scion of
the Obrenovitches and was marked down from his accession.

Vladan Georgevitch, who was Prime Minister of Serbia from 1897 till
1900, in his book The End of a Dynasty, throws much light on the
events that led up to the final catastrophe. It is highly
significant that after its publication he was sentenced to six
months' imprisonment, not for libel or false statements, but "on a
charge of having acted injuriously to Serbia by publishing State
secrets." His account is therefore in all probability correct. He
begins by relating Prince Alexander's visit to Montenegro shortly
after the termination of the Regency. Here the astute Prince Nikola
tried to persuade him