It was a hopeless situation. The Red Guards had not only to fight the highly organized German legions, but they had to disarm the panic-stricken Russian soldiers. In the rear they were fighting Kaledin, Korniloff, and the troops of the Ukrainian Rada. None of these were fighting the Germans. In action they had aligned themselves with German absolutism, and were seeking to overthrow the Russian democracy--the Soviet government. The diplomats had been so busy hunting for German money in the camp of the Bolsheviki that they had overlooked entirely the Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, and Finland. The Ukraine situation has been shot through with Austrian and German money since the beginning of the Revolution. It had been a hot-bed of intrigue. More potent than the power of money was the natural economic desire of the upper classes in each of these places. It was not the Ukrainian worker and peasant who made a separate peace with Germany. It was not the Finnish Red Guard who invited the Germans in to subjugate their fellow countrymen. It was not the class-conscious masses of the Baltic provinces, crushed beneath the boot of the German-bred Black Barons, who cried to the Kaiser for deliverance. Something more dangerous to the peace of the world than a government of workers, peasants, and soldiers had been carefully builded by the German agents. When Prince Leopold of Bavaria told his advancing troops they were going upon a mission of altruism and humanity, he neglected to tell them that the people whom they were going to save were not the masses of the Russians, trying to work out their own salvation against desperate odds, but the land barons and monarchists of the old order whom the Revolution overthrew. The Russians were blind to the true character of the men who came to Brest-Litovsk to negotiate a kaiser’s peace; but the blindness of those Russian dreamers was lucid vision as compared with the blindness of the enlightened democratic world as to the real significance of the various forces at work upon the Russian tragedy. We will pay for that blindness,--we must pay,--for democracy is not safe in the world while Russia is enslaved. No settlement of the international situation will be lasting that does not leave the peoples of Russia free to work out their own democratic salvation. The failure of Allied diplomacy in Russia was due to the undemocratic nature of the existing diplomatic system. It is not enough to know the movements of kings and kaisers, the pleasure of military leaders, of the will of the aristocracy. In a fight for democracy, the people, in the last analysis, are the important factor. The true study of democratic diplomacy is the study of the movements of the masses undisturbed by our own beliefs, preconceptions, or prejudices.