France and Germany has died down or has been killed by a new spirit and a community of interests. Herriot, the democratic Prime Minister of France, was the first to offer a truce to that hatred, and the new spirit has begun to work a little on both sides of the Rhine, though it is a delicate growth which will need great encouragement. In Hungary, and to a less extent in Austria, racial passion is also smouldering, and could be quickly fanned into flame. The Hungarians are a proud fighting race, who feel themselves superior to neighbours like the Serbs and Roumanians occupying some of their ancient territory. “It will not always be like this,” some of them told me. “Something will break, and we shall move. Not all the tears of women will put out the red flame of that future war of liberation when we shall join hands with our kinsfolk and smash these artificial boundaries imposed by a scandalous peace.” The Balkans are still a stewpot of racial passions and rivalries—Serbs, Bulgars, Montenegrins, Albanians, Roumanians, Greeks and Turks all snarling at each other, all waiting until the Great Powers get to grips again, or are too busy to intervene between these smaller nations. THE RACIAL AMBITIONS OF RUSSIA Russia is becoming race-conscious again. Now that the revolutionary period seems to have ended, and internal peace has been established, the Soviet Government is thinking far more racially than communistically. Communism no longer exists in Russia as a strict system. It died before Lenin, who re-established the right of private trading and private property with certain reservations which do not affect the private citizens within the state to any appreciable extent. The Communistic propaganda is reserved mainly for foreign consumption, in order to create trouble in other states and especially to weaken those countries which are most antagonistic to the Russian form of government. Men like Radek and Tchicherin, whom I interviewed in Moscow at the time of famine, were beginning to think again of Russia as a world power. All their talk was of that. They are Russians before they are Communists. They would be glad to see a world revolution, and their agents are doing what they can to provoke it, but mainly because they see the Slav race rising above that economic ruin and taking advantage of its weakness. Their eyes are turned to Riga, outside their present boundaries, as an open port when Petrograd is blocked by ice. They have no love for those new Baltic nations—Latvia, Esthonia, and Lithuania—which gained their independence at the expense of Russia. They hate the Poles, and the new war, if it happens in Europe, will begin when Germany and Russia try to join hands across the prostrate body of Poland.