Had the Kaiser succeeded in having these terms changed? Who knows? Certainly one can trace the hand of German diplomacy in the events of the next seven years, most of which are a matter of common knowledge. The steady aggressions of Russia in Persia during the troubled years of 1910-1912; the almost open flouting of the terms of the treaty, which expressly guaranteed Persian integrity; the constant growth of German influence, culminating in the Persian extension of the German-owned Bagdad Railway; the founding of a German school and a hospital in Teheran, jointly supported by Germany and Persia; and finally, the celebrated Potsdam Agreement of 1910, between Russia and Germany, in which Germany agreed to recognize Russia’s claim to Northern Persia as its sphere of influence, which provided for a further rapprochement between the two countries in the matter of railroad construction and commercial development generally, and which has been generally supposed to contain a guarantee that neither country would join “any combination of Powers that has any aggressive tendency against the other.” And England did not protest, in spite of the fact that the Potsdam Agreement absolutely negatived her own treaty with Russia and made it, in the language of one writer, “a farce and a deception!” Why? Was it because she believed that when war came, as it inevitably must, Russia would forget this new alliance in allegiance to the old? England was mistaken, if she believed so. Russia—Imperial Russia—was never so much the friend of Germany as when, neglecting the war on her own Western front, she sent her armies into the Caucasus, persuaded the British to undertake the Dardanelles expedition, and, following her own plans of Asiatic expansion, betrayed England!