Securely entrenched in the Russian Court, in the Army, in the bureaucracy, in the Universities, in the Diplomatic Service, the Germans secured a no less commanding influence in trade and industry. As we have already pointed out, Russia, until recent years, had remained an agricultural country without a middle class. The trade remained almost entirely in foreign hands. Already in the Middle Ages Russian cities, like Novgorod, were affiliated to the German Hanseatic League. In the sixteenth century adventurous English explorers and traders, whose exploits are amongst the most thrilling of Hakluyt’s voyages, tried to oust their German competitors, but they utterly failed. The Russians themselves are excellent traders, and the merchant guilds of Moscow have been for centuries a powerful commercial organization. Even to-day you will meet in Moscow unassuming Russian merchants leading the simplest of lives and possessed of enormous wealth. But the Russian merchant is generally conservative, un-enterprising, a bad linguist, and servilely attached to ancient usages. He is scarcely a match for the foreigner. In recent years British and Belgian traders as well as Jews and Armenians have shared in the enormous trade of the Russian Empire, _but the Germans have secured the lion’s share_. And what is true of Russian trade is equally true of Russian industry. The liberal economic policy of Witte has created in one generation powerful industrial centres in Central Russia, and especially in Poland. Here, again, the Germans have benefited more than all their competitors together. Lodz, the “Manchester of Russian Poland,” has ceased to be either Polish or Russian, and has become a German manufacturing town. Caprivi, Bismarck’s successor, negotiated with the Russian Government a treaty of commerce which gave enormous advantages to German industry, and if the German Government had continued to show the wisdom of Bismarck and Caprivi, Germany would certainly have profited more than any other country by the commercial expansion of the Russian Empire. XIII. It might have been expected that a German influence so absolutely supreme in every sphere of society, in every walk of life, should have extended to the lower classes. But the common people were never affected by German methods and remained untainted by the German spirit. To the Russian moujik, the German remained the _Niemets_, the mute, the alien enemy. The Russian peasant, with his simple ways and his child-like faith, a mystic and an idealist, has an instinctive antipathy to the modern Prussian, who is an implacable realist, selfish, calculating, and aggressive. The persistence with which the Russian people have resisted and escaped Prussian influence is not the least convincing proof of the soundness of the Slav character. XIV.