There are students of history who would have us believe that certain nations are natural allies, fitted by character and temperament to agree, and to add to one another’s pleasure and profit. Germany and Russia have been cited more than once as countries instinctively well disposed towards each other, because each supplements the other’s talents. Bismarck ranked the Germans as among the male, and the Slavs as among the female nations of the world. The driving power he rightfully assigned to Germany. “The soft Slav nature,” says a writer in “The New Republic,” “emotional, sensitive, but undisciplined, has derived most of such progress as it has made in material civilization from German sources.” Both countries have proved unsound allies, and Russia has the feminine quality of changeableness. “Dangerous to her foes, disastrous to her friends.” Both make the same kind of currency, and stand in need of business partners who make a different sort. America, with the gold of Europe locked up in her treasury, is the most desirable, but least accessible, partner in Christendom. As the great creditor of the civilized world, she has been impelled to assert that no participation on her part in any international conference implies a surrender of her claims to payment. France, as the great sufferer by a world’s war, has made it equally clear that no participation on _her_ part implies a surrender of her claims to reparation. The anger and shame with which the Allies first saw the injuries inflicted on her have been softened by time; and that strange twist in human nature which makes men more concerned for the welfare of a criminal than for the welfare of his victim has disposed us to think kindly of an unrepentant Germany. But France cannot well forget the wounds from which she bleeds. Less proud than Britain, which prefers beggary to debt, she is infinitely more logical; and it is the unassailable strength of her position which has irritated the sentimentalists of the world, whose hearts are in the right place, but whose heads are commonly elsewhere.