the inhabitants of Austria and Germany. The nations of the Entente did not reply to these charges of the Germans. There was no reply to make; it was the truth. In fact there is no doubt that French and British statesmen were afraid of a Russian victory. They did not want the war to be won by the one nation in their group which had a despotic form of government. On the other hand the high officials in Russia were not any too happy at the thought of their alliance with the free peoples of western Europe. Germany was much more their ideal of a country governed in the proper manner than was France. As you have been told, many of the nobles of the Russian court were of German blood and secretly desired the victory of their fatherland, while many Russians of the party who wanted to keep all power out of the hands of the common people were afraid of seeing Germany crushed, for fear their own people would rise up and demand more liberty. You will recall that there had been unrest in Russia at the time of the outbreak of the war; that strikes and labor troubles were threatened, so that many people thought the Czar had not been at all sorry to see the war break out, in order to turn the minds of his people away from their own wrongs. At the close of the disastrous war with the Japanese in 1905, the cry from the Russian people for a Congress, or some form of elective government, had been so strong that the Czar had to give in. So he called the first Duma. This body of men, as has been explained, could talk and could complain, but could pass no laws. The first Duma had had so many grievances and had talked so bitterly against the government, that it had been forced to break up, and Cossack troops were called in to put down riots among the people at St. Petersburg, which they did with great ferocity. All this time there had been growing, among the Russian people, a feeling that they were being robbed and betrayed by the grand dukes and high nobles. They distrusted the court. They felt that the Czar was well-meaning, but weak, and that he was a mere puppet in the hands of his German wife, his cousins the grand dukes, and above all a notorious monk, called Rasputin. This strange man, a son of the common people, had risen to great power in the court. He had persuaded the Empress that he alone could keep health and strength in the frail body of the crown prince, the Czarevitch, and to keep up this delusion he had bribed one of the ladies in waiting to pour a mild poison into the boy’s food whenever Rasputin was away from the court for more than a few days. The poor little prince, of course, was made sick; whereupon, the Empress would hurriedly send for Rasputin, upon