begun by my earlier memorandum to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. The University (King’s College) offered me a Slavonic professorship. Other Slavonic specialists were to be enrolled and a Slavonic department established. Seton Watson pressed the professorship upon me again and again on behalf of Dr. Burrows, the Principal; and though I was reluctant to take it, because I am not a Slavonic specialist and feared that I should have no leisure for scientific work, I ended by accepting it—and did well to follow the advice of my friends. On October 2, 1915, I settled matters with Dr. Burrows whose manliness and devotion to his University I esteemed highly. In gratitude and friendship I record my relations with a man who was at once a distinguished Classical Hellenist and an authority on modern Greek culture and politics.
The subject of my inaugural lecture on October 19, 1915, was “The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis.” It was our first big political success. Above all, the fact that the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, had agreed to take the chair accredited me to the broader political public in London; and, as Mr. Asquith fell ill, Lord Robert Cecil represented him—a political background that gave our cause a great lift. In itself, the lecture had a good and far-reaching effect, as had the French translation of it. It brought out for the first time the political significance of the zone of small peoples in Europe that lies between the Germans and the Russians; it enabled me to put both the German “Drang nach Osten” (The Urge towards the East) and Russian policy in a new light, and to show the essential characters of Austria-Hungary and Prussia. In this light, the breaking up of Austria-Hungary by the liberation of her peoples was revealed as the main requirement of the war. Finally, I argued strongly against the fear of the so-called Balkanization of Europe and urged, convincingly I think, that small nations are capable of and have a right to independent development as States, each according to its own culture. The lecture was widely reported and its effect noticeable. Henceforth the small peoples and the possibility of their independence were seriously talked and written about. The positive side of the war—reconstruction—came into the foreground, replacing the conception that its object was either defence against the Germanic Powers or their overthrow, and placing the war in its true light as the beginning of the great refashioning of Central and Eastern Europe and, indeed, of Europe as a whole.
