As we have seen, the grounds for Germany’s optimistic forecast were reinforced by the opinions of certain Russian authorities. These experts strongly held that a war with Germany would open the sluice-gates of disaster for their country. There are always such Calchases in every land, but Russia possesses an abnormally large number of them. Some of these views were committed to paper, laid before the highest authorities, and also reported simultaneously to the Foreign Office in Berlin. The financial, military, and political considerations adduced in support of these conclusions were also fully set forth in the communications on the subject which Germany’s agents in St. Petersburg supplied to the Wilhelmstrasse. Much of interest might be written on this aspect of the preliminaries to the war--much that is striking, instructive, and in a way sensational--but this is hardly the moment for anything in the nature of startling disclosures. In what the policy consisted which Germany and Austria pursued under the mask of indignation against the Servian abettors of murder is well known by now even to the general public. Over and over again I unfolded it in the columns of the _Daily Telegraph_; and from the day on which ominous rumours about Austria’s expected Note to Servia began to disquiet Europe, I announced that the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was but the flimsiest of pretexts, that Austria was minded to take the initiative in the struggle of the Teutons against the Slavs, and that the European press was making a strange mistake in accepting the theory that her aim was the condign punishment of the accomplices of the assassins. I added that this was no dispute, in the ordinary sense of the term, between Austria and Servia; it was only a question of which of the two could impose its will on the other. In a word, it was a trial of strength--_eine Machtfrage_. Germany’s aim, I repeat, was, and had long been, to sever the bonds that linked France with Russia, so as to be able to tackle each one separately. The methods to which her statesmen had recourse in order to effect a severance between the two allies were of a piece with the expedients now being resorted to for the purpose of egging on Turkey to a breach of her neutrality--such as the forging of Mr. Burns’ alleged oration and the speech of the Lord Mayor of London against the war. But some of them which have never yet been even hinted at are far more sensational even than this. One of the Kaiser’s own little schemes which has never been mentioned even in well-informed diplomatic circles outdid in breeziness the episode of the scrap of paper.