character over night, nor can the Germans, who deem themselves the most gifted and vigorous race on the globe, be content to play a subordinate part in the world's drama while their "inferior rivals strut about the stage as heroes." Pluming themselves on their heaven-sent mission to take over the leadership of the race, they feel it to be a duty no less than a right to fulfil it. And there is every reason to believe that they will respond to this call of duty as promptly in the future as they have done in the past and with the same resourcefulness and unscrupulousness. Their will is set; all that is needed is power. Such is the temper of the nation and the most liberal constitution that Germany, as at present attuned, can give herself, will not modify it. In theory the sole efficacious way of tackling the problem would seem to be for the Allies to keep their adversary deprived of the means of effecting his purpose until such time as genuine democratic principles have permeated his mind. Can they effect this? Even this corrective may be impotent to neutralize the ingrained German racial impulse to dominate, but so far as one

can

now see, nothing else can accomplish the feat.

Once master that psychological fact and you will be prepared for the quibbling of Chancellors and the prevarications of publicists. Lately Herr Michaelis, the stalking-horse of General Ludendorff, affirmed that a fair peace basis might be arrived at on the lines of the Reichstag's "No annexations" declaration. But he craftily added: "As I understand it." Later on he denied that he had absolutely acquiesced in that declaration--and finally he protested that he did acquiesce in it unreservedly. Now to attempt to build the European peace fabric on such moving sands as these declarations and glosses would be a dangerous

venture and no conscientious statesman mindful of his duty as the trustee of his people would undertake it. As President Wilson put it, "in such a Government, following such methods, we can never have a friend."

The cardinal conception which vitalizes the Allies' striving for peace provides for the settlement of territorial disputes by allowing each nationality to shape its own destinies and by recognizing the claim of every State to enjoy free access to the sea. The peace concluded on this basis would be made stable by eschewing alliances directed against other Powers and drawing all States together in one great federation with a common executive whose military and naval forces should considerably exceed those of each individual member of the concern. This proposal, which is nowise new, has much to recommend it. But as yet it is hardly more than an ideal. The Central Empires will not even feign to accept it. Austria still denies to her non-German nationalities the right to govern themselves, nor would Germany allow her Poles to secede from the Empire and coalesce with the new kingdom of Poland. Indeed, if we may take the recent utterances of French and Italian Cabinet Ministers for the expression of the will of their respective nations, these too would demur to the principle of consulting the populations of the "unredeemed" provinces and abiding by the result of a plebiscite.

Much ground, then, must yet be traversed by the war-waging Governments before they reach a sufficiently narrow part of the gulf separating them to admit of its being spanned by a peace conference. The peoples are believed to be less uncompromising. I am unable to discern more than two possible issues out of this contest for the future ordering of the world: a grandiose international

monarchy of the absolute type, or else a loose federation of nations-the former the outcome of a German victory, the latter of a German defeat. As for the "negotiated peace" which now occupies the field of public discussion, whether it be decreed admissible, desirable, or necessary, it would, to my thinking, be neither more nor less than a masked German success. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that a vast and growing body of opinion and sentiment favors this way of ending the war, and flatters itself that a democratized Germany will shed the Prussian coil, forget her "racial superiority," turn from her secular aims, and fall into line with the "inferior" peoples whose mission it should be to devote themselves to her service.

That optimism is one result, and not the least sinister, of the doctrine preached by the Allied Governments from the outset that time is on our side. Time is never on the side of a coalition, but invariably on that of its adversary. It was belief in the helpful effect of time that kept the Allied peoples browsing on hope while the Germans were everywhere, actively preparing the ruin of Roumania, the Revolution in Russia, and constructing a fleet of powerful submarines for the purpose of keeping the consignments of our transports under the requirements of our Allies. The truth about time as an ally may be summed up in the Arab proverb: "Time is a sharp sword with which you must make haste to smite your enemy, lest you yourself be smitten by it." Time brought forth the Russian Revolution, which, like so many other events of the past three years, took the Allied Governments by surprise. They had no idea that that imbroglio

*I employ the expression to denote the deposition of the Tsar, the change of régime and the decomposition of the army. The real revolution has not yet begun.

was coming to complicate the tangled elements of the war. The illustrious delegates who had been sent to Petrograd on the eve of the outbreak to reconnoitre the position came back with the certitude that the revolutionary forces would be kept under control until peace negotiations began.

When the storm-cloud burst the British Government, and in particular the Prime Minister, hailed it with joy as the harbinger of halcyon weather, although many, like myself, knew that it might mean the confiscation of land, the murder of officers, the destruction of military discipline and possibly even the disruption of Russia. For some of these Dead Sea fruits were found growing on the tree of liberty that was hastily planted in the year 1905. But we were exhorted to cheer up, and told that Russia's offensive would be more formidable than ever. Officers' delegates had resolved unanimously to advance. Brussiloff's army was impatient for the fray. All the cavalry regiments had sworn to march against the foe.* Stirring speeches were being delivered at banquets all over the country. And yet one felt that the resolutions and declarations of Russian delegates, officers, and Ministers are but counters; the coin is the temper of the soldiers, and the one thing that matters is whether or no they mean to obey orders and risk their lives. And I had seen no reason to believe that they did. What I feared was that the reaction against anarchy and chaos might lead to civil strife and to a Teuto-Russian front for the delectation of our enemies. This fear has not been dispelled by recent events.

Since then Europe has had the distraction of the Korniloff-Kerensky episode, which for several dayssay the reports-left the front inactive and almost powerless. It was

*The Times, June 2d. 1917.

The

bound to come, and it is likely to repeat itself. The thinking and working classes in Russia are tired of bloodshed and anarchy, and long for the establishment of passable order and coherent methods of government. country has been swept as by a tornado, and the streets of the capital have been the scenes of atrocities indescribable. Bands of armed plunderers still visit the houses of the well-to-do and snap up money and valuables, while the well-paid police seem blind and dumb and palsied. In the country the estates of landed proprietors have in many instances been violently seized by the peasants. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have thus been suddenly reduced from wealth or competence to penury or misery, and for all redress they are bidden to remember that they are paying for the priceless boons of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. But what they feel is that they have only exchanged one privileged class for another; yesterday the nobles and the educated were at the summit, today the workmen and the illiterates.

Life in Russia under present conditions, they complain, is unbearable. Neither for person nor for property is there even a semblance of protection. Vagrant bands shoot and stab and rob with impunity. Private vengeance and lynch justice have largely superseded the criminal law. Even in Petrograd men as well as women are afraid to be in the streets after sundown. "The capital," writes the Novoye Vremya, "is abandoned to itself. Its inhabitants have to live like the birds of the air, to go in quest of their food wherever they can find it and to protect themselves. And this existence is dignified with the name of liberty!"*

The following brief sketch of some of the incidents of Russian liberty is *Novoye Vremya, July 15th, 1917.

Street

worth reproducing. "It is past midnight. Cimmerian darkness lies heavy on the streets. The trams are tearing madly along to the terminus. Black night penetrates through the open window. Quick-firing guns emit their ominous rhythmic sound. . . . The click clack of rifles is also audible on every side. In a word, we are in the firing line. In the firing line! But where? At the front? In Warsaw or Dvinsk? Oh, no, in Petrograd, in Erteleff Street (the office of the Novoye Vremya newspaper). The Editor is calmly discussing tomorrow's issue. Correctors are reading the proofs. Now and again reporters run in with items of news. And what news? 'On the Nikolayeff Bridge firing has begun!' 'The machine-guns are playing on the Morskaya Street.' 'There is a fusillade on the Palace Square.' 'In the Catherine the firing is heavy.' And so on. Illstarred, luckless old Petrograd! To what a plight art thou reduced by traitors, dastards and the benighted ones of the nation! There is no peaceful life more in our native city. are at the front-nay, we are in a worse plight than those at the front for we do not even know where our enemies are, whence they come, or when or where to await them." Industry and many branches of trade and commerce are at a standstill. Factories and works are everywhere closing. In Ekaterinburg the chemical works have been shut down in consequence of the demands of the workmen for a preposterous rise in wages. In the Donetz basin all the wire works have been closed and over 13,000 men thrown out of employment. In Kharkoff a conference of Factory Committees was held which deserves special mentior. For a historic resolution was passed there entirely abolishing strikes.

*Ibid., July 21st, 1917.

We

What arrests attention is the motive assigned. Strikes, it is explained, are henceforth superfluous because all the workmen's demands without exception must in future be accepted by the respective administrations whether they will or no, as otherwise within five days the directors of the establishments will be sent away and in their place the workmen will appoint their own directors. Conciliatory committees are on no account to be tolerated."*

"It is true to say," we read in the principal Petrograd journal, "that the crisis in Russia's culture is not a whit less grave than the crisis which her industry and agriculture are presently passing through. . . . The rights of the teacher, the doctor, the author, the scholar, the artist, the musician, the petty official, the indispensable clerk, the technician, are trampled underfoot by the privileged democracy of factories, their work is rated lower than manual labor and their talents and knowledge are set at naught."†

Misery Famine

Ways of communication are utterly defective, even the American Railway Commission cannot enable them to distribute sufficient foodstuffs and materials to the armies or the civil population, which is said to be now worse off in Petrograd and Moscow than in Berlin and Breslau. and squalor are rampant. and disease are at the gates. The Provisional Government by forbidding transactions in land has discouraged both landlords and peasants from sowing adequate quantities of corn, with the result that next year there will be a formidable shortage.

Under these conditions it is impossible to wage war efficiently against Germany, and it looked as though it

*Ibid.. July 21st, 1917.

Novoye Vremya, July 20th, 1917.

My own relatives have paid 150 roubles (about £16 at the pre-war rate of exchange) each for ordinary pairs of boots, and had to wait for weeks before they could get them.

would soon become impossible to wage it at all. The soldiers deserted in tens of thousands, convinced that their committees, which constitute the real Government, desire peace and therefore do not wish them to fight. The enemy advanced farther and farther into the country, and sometimes the most serious obstacle he encountered was the weather or the bad roads.

This spectacle of a numerous and powerful people going to wreck and ruin goaded a number of officers into a daring effort to save the nation at the cost of a party. Their plan met with approval and encouragement among the more moderate elements, which had kept monarchical sentiments and aims in active glow. At first it was hoped that Brussiloff would fire the train and rid the country of the impediments to self-defensive action. But Brussiloff did nothing, and the belief spread that none of the Russian Generals possessed the moral fiber and perspicacity requisite for such a feat. It was then that Korniloff, the son of a Cossack peasant, who had worked his way up to the supreme command of the armies, stepped forward and behaved as though he would play the part. Of many factors of the problem he was wholly ignorant, but his motives-like those of Kerenskywere above criticism.

His reasoning and that of his friends was simple: the administration presided over by Kerensky, they argued, was one of the main causes of Russia's downfall. The Premier, they said, is being tolerated and utilized as their moderator and executor by the committees of workmen, men who do no work, of soldiers who abhor fighting, and of peasants who confiscate the land. At heart a pacifist, he has been laboring hard to bring about peace at Stockholm and elsewhere. Personally patriotic and upright, he stands for a body of corrosive

doctrine, which has demoralized the army and is disintegrating the nation. He is the spokesman of a group which holds that wars are made by greedy capitalists for their own aggrandizement, and that the present war was arranged by Britain for lucre. The fraternization between the soldiers

of the XIIth Army and the Germans was approved by the Council which upholds Kerensky. At any moment the Maximalist elements may decree confiscation of the land, the seizure of capital, and the conclusion of peace, and call upon the Premier to see that their behests are carried out. Now, instead of all this dangerous playing with fire, what the country needs is a tremendous effort to drive off the enemy. But so long as the present régime continues this effort cannot be made.

...

As the feeling against "capitalistic Britain and France" is deep and bitter among the Premier's backers, these allies of Russia could not well intervene in her domestic quarrel. Besides, it would have been tactless to offend a hyper-sensitive people only just emancipated from an oppressive yoke, by suggesting that they are incapable of regulating their own affairs before they have made the discovery for themselves. The Allies did, however, try to prevent Korniloff and Kerensky from fighting.

The fall of Riga is a portent for the Allies as well as for Russia. It adds considerably to the task, already overwhelming, that the latter had set themselves. For the work achieved by the hostile armies has presumably to be undone by the allied forces. The enemy himself will not undo it. Now the establishment of the German fleet in Libau was unquestionably the most arresting change made on the Baltic shores since the war began, until the fall of Riga overshadowed it. Now Reval on the one hand and

Pskoff on the other are open to the Teuton armies, and if the fate of Riga does not overtake one or the other this year the reason must be looked for in the unsuspected weakness of the German line. These conquests whenever made will have permanent as well as fleeting consequences. Unless countered successfully, they will lead to national paralysis. The question whether the temporary Russian "Government" then makes or refuses to make a separate peace will be almost immaterial, for with Russia as a fresh source of supplies to draw from Germany would soon make good her shortage of materials and also to some extent her loss of men.

A consequence more lasting would make itself felt at the peace conference and after. It would take the form of an endeavor by the enemy to dismember Russia permanently by a mock application of the Allies' principle of every nation's right to shape its own life. To my knowledge this is an integral part of the Teuton program. Its first concrete manifestation was the promulgation of the independence of Poland. The Polish army that was to have been created by the Council of State in Warsaw for the behoof of the Central Empires having been definitely refused by that body, a new scheme for Poland's resuscitation differing from the pristine plan was outlined and is now under serious consideration. It is this: all the Kingdom of Poland, excepting a strip to the north ear-marked by Germany would be taken over by Austria as a third member of a triune Habsburg Monarchy. It would consist not of Poland only, but of Poland, Lithuania, Courland, Livland, and Esthland, and would therefore be an Austria in miniature. This arrangement, coupled with the independence of Finland, would cut off Russia from the Baltic, while the independence of the