The Germans are already in close commercial alliance with Russia. German ploughs, railway engines, manufactured goods, are being exchanged for Russian wheat, flax, furs, oil, and diamonds. The Russians do not love the Germans, but they will co-operate with them in self interest. A German revolution would please them mightily. But German Imperialism will not be spurned by Soviet Russia, certainly not by Tchicherin and his friends, if a military and trade alliance would result in the downfall of Poland, followed perhaps by the capture of Constantinople and the way through Serbia to the Adriatic. The old dreams of Pan-Slavism are stirring again among those who control the destiny of Russia. Radek, the chief propagandist, sees red in the direction of India and Afghanistan. The downfall of the British “Raj” in India might be followed by a Russian Empire in the East. THE DARK HORSE Russia is the Dark Horse of Europe. It is impossible to foretell what road it will travel. Above the mass of ignorant and patient peasants desiring peace in their fields and praying God for good harvests, there is a crowd of nimble-minded men holding the machinery of power: ambitious, cynical, with some cause, of the high moralities preached by other powers, unscrupulous and adventurous. Some of them, in my opinion most of them, are not personally ambitious for gold or luxury or greed. They lead austere lives. Tchicherin spends most of his days and nights in two little rooms barely furnished. Radek has an untidy old den crammed with books along a whitewashed corridor in the Kremlin. Most of them, I believe, have a sincere desire to improve the conditions of their people, to eliminate disease, to give them a decent share of human happiness. They were relentless against their political enemies, like all leaders of revolution who live in terror of reaction, and by their terror are made cruel. They have an Oriental indifference for human life, and they believe that a life is forfeited by crime or political hostility to their way of rule. Many of these men were not personally responsible for the atrocities which happened in the fever and frightfulness of revolutionary madness. They are intellectual, highly educated, irreligious men, devoid of sentiment, suspicious of each other, with a cold passionate hatred for the old régime, and with a fanatical belief in their own form of tyranny, a contempt for the ignorance of the peasant mind, and a detestation of the Orthodox Church and all forms of Christian faith, as many of the recent Ministers of France, including Clemenceau, Millerand and Briand were in earlier days. They are amused by the fear of “Bolshevism” in other countries. It flatters their vanity and appeals to their sense of humour. Many are for the most part “realists” who believe in Force as the only argument, or, failing force, guile. They are not, as a class, pacifists or humanitarians, nor do they trouble to give any lip service to their ideals.