its own hand its grave," and to Britain will fall more fully than ever before the leadership of the Mahommedan world. The loyalty and devotion of the Moslem community in India can best be repaid by the most scrupulous and sympathetic attention to the interests of Islam throughout the world. §16. _Russia and Poland._--It is no mere accident that Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey should be ranged on the same side in the great European struggle; for they represent, each in its own way, those false conceptions of nationality which have so long envenomed the public life of Europe, and which, for want of better words, have been described as Germanisation, Magyarisation, and Turkification. It would, however, be flagrantly untrue to suggest that those three States enjoyed a monopoly of racial intolerance; for the ideas on nationality which dominated official Russia under the old absolutist régime and which so rapidly regained the upper hand under Stolypin and the triumphant bureaucracy, struck at the very root of tolerance and political liberty. But recent years have revealed a subtle change of attitude. The policy of Russification had not been abandoned; indeed in Finland and the Ukraine it survived in its most odious form. But it was none the less possible to detect a growing note of interrogation even among the bureaucracy, and still more an increasing movement of impatient protest on the part of thinking Russians. Without in any way ignoring what has happened in Persia, we have every right to point to the essential fact that Russia has of her own accord raised the question of nationality and thus set in motion vast forces which are already shaking Europe to its foundations. In proclaiming as one of her foremost aims the restoration of Polish Unity, Russia did not, it is true, commit herself to any concrete project of autonomy. But whether her action represents genuine feeling on the part of the Tsar and his advisers, as M. Gabriel Hanotaux so positively asserts, or whether it was originally a mere manoeuvre to prevent the Polish question being raised against her, it is at least certain that Russia has entered upon a new path from which it will be very difficult if not impossible to recede. The Russian Poles, under the leadership of M. Dmowski, have rallied loyally round the Tsar; and there are many signs that the long-deferred Russo-Polish _rapprochement_ is at length on the point of fulfillment. Here economic interests play their part, for in recent years the district between Warsaw and Lodz has become one of the chief industrial centres of the Russian Empire, and its annexation to Austria or to Prussia would place a tariff wall between it and the South Russian markets upon which it chiefly depends. The Poles of Galicia, having enjoyed the utmost liberty under Austrian rule, have naturally been almost immune from the discontent so noticeable among their kinsmen in Russia and Prussia, and have indeed for a generation past formed