I need not emphasize the supreme importance of those close family relations between the Courts of Russia and Germany, _and especially between the Courts of Russia and Prussia_. It is the peculiarity of an autocratic government that the smallest causes are productive of the greatest consequences, and amongst those smaller causes none are likely to produce more far-reaching results than the personal likes and dislikes of the ruler and his family. In the Empire of the Tsars the sympathies of the ruler and of the Imperial family for a hundred and fifty years have generally been German. Women have no less influence in Russia than in other countries, and as every Russian Princess has, for a hundred and fifty years, been German in origin, German by training, German by pride of birth, German by prejudice, the Teutonic influences have necessarily been supreme in the Russian Court. Nor must we forget that every German Princess coming to Petrograd would bring with her a numerous suite of ladies-in-waiting and Court officials, so that the German Court colony was automatically increasing. Indeed, it is no mere chance that the capital, the military harbour, and the chief Imperial residences should all have German names—Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Schluessenburg, Petersburg, and Peterhof. Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. Petersburg has been the outpost of Germany in the Russian Empire, the _feste Burg_ of Prussia until the eve of the war. III. From what has been said, it is obvious that the national Romanov Dynasty, founded in 1613 by Michael Romanov, Patriarch of all the Russias, ceased to be a Romanov Dynasty at the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1761. With Peter III. it is a German Dynasty which ascends the throne. Peter III., son of a Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, is a Romanov in the proportion of one-half; Paul, son of a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, in the proportion of one-fourth; Alexander I. and Nicholas I., sons of a Princess of Würtemberg, in the proportion of one-eighth; Alexander II., son of a Princess of Hohenzollern, to the extent of one-sixteenth; Alexander III., son of a Grand Duchess of Hesse-Darmstadt, to the extent of one thirty-second; and the late ruler, Nicholas II., who married a Princess of the House of Oldenburg, to the extent of one sixty-fourth. One sixty-fourth of the blood of the late Tsar is Russian Romanov blood. In the proportion of sixty-three sixty-fourths it is the blood of Holstein, of Anhalt, of Oldenburg, of Hesse, of Würtemberg, of Hohenzollern, which flows through the veins of the late Emperor of all the Russias. IV.