Coming to the Russians themselves, we find whole sections of them as badly disposed towards their Government as the Jews, the Poles, and the Finns. The industrial population is one seething mass of disaffection. Rebellion is smouldering among them, and needs only a puff of wind, such as a European war would supply in abundance, to break out into flame.[6] Before Russia could decide to go to war she would have to station one army corps in Finland, another in Poland, and a third and fourth in the interior to keep order among the restless peasants, who have their own aims and grievances, which would have to be considered if war broke out. In a word, Russia is bound hand and foot. She cannot make a warlike move. And if her diplomatists speak as though she contemplated such a step, it will be nothing more than bluff. Moving along this line of reasoning, the statesmen of Berlin and Vienna reached the comforting conclusion that they had nothing to fear from the Tsardom. And that was the crucial point that had needed elucidation. For if the Tsar’s Government remained inactive while Servia was being punished and Turkey and Bulgaria bribed, there would be no cause to apprehend a hitch. Certes, no European Power would risk hostilities to help Servia out of a tight place, or, indeed, to bring about any change in the map of the Balkans. The only interference possible must come from the Tsardom, and if that Empire were indeed paralysed, opposition from the group of three Powers would be eliminated. And it was clear that Russia was, for the moment at any rate, paralysed in almost every organ. The Tsar, the Duma, the army, the War Office, the Finance Ministry, the ethnic elements of the Empire, held each other in check. That this was the theory held in Berlin, and with a trifle less tenacity and conviction in Vienna, I know. I can also aver that the principal grounds on which it was based were those which I have set forth. And although it is idle now to speculate on what might have been under conditions that were not realized, I think one may fairly hazard the conjecture that if it had been proved to the satisfaction of the statesmen of Austria that their inferences and the half-truths or undiluted errors from which they drew them were indeed erroneous, and that Russia’s forbearance would not stretch as far as the meditated aggression nor her resources prove as limited as her enemies’ theories assumed, the ultimatum to Servia would have been worded by Austria, acting alone and in accordance with international usage, and the demands it embodied would have been whittled down to the maximum of what could reasonably have been exacted.