into the west, and Prussia was supporting Russia.
In 1876 Turkey was again in trouble and was again backed by Britain, though necessarily without the support of France. The result was to head off Russian power from Constantinople, but at the cost of giving to the Germans their first step towards the Balkan Corridor by handing over to Austrian keeping the Slav Provinces, hitherto Turkish, of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On that occasion the British Fleet, by Turkish sufferance, steamed through the Dardanelles to within sight of the minarets of Constantinople. The great change in the orientation of Russian policy had not yet occurred, and neither Russia nor Britain yet foresaw the economic methods of amassing man-power to which Berlin was about to resort.
When we look back on the course of events during the hundred years after the French Revolution, and consider East Europe as the basis of what was on the whole a single force in the world's affairs, do we not realise that separate as people of the Victorian Age often thought the politics of Europe from those of the Not-Europe outside, there was, in fact, no such separation. East Europe was in command of the Heartland, and was opposed
