on the contrary, had to suffer the humiliation of giving a pledge to the Austrian Ambassador at St. Petersburg that she would not support Servia.  That humiliation Russia has not forgotten.  She has saved money, she has reorganized her army, she has done everything in her power to gain security for the future.  And now that Austria has sought utterly to humiliate Servia on the unproved charge (unproved, in the sense that no legal proof was offered)[23] of complicity in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Russia has risked war rather than surrender her protection of a Slav kingdom.  Slav sentiment imperatively demanded action in favour of Servia:  no government could refuse to listen to the demand.  The stake for Russia is not merely the integrity of Servia:  it is her prestige among the Slav peoples, of which she is head; and behind all lies the question whether South-Eastern Europe shall be under Teutonic control, and lost to Russian influence.

Germany has not only threatened Slav life in South-Eastern Europe:  she has irritated Slav feeling on her own Eastern frontier.  The vitality and the increase of the Slavs in Eastern Germany has excited deep German alarm.  The German Government has therefore of late years pursued a policy of repression towards its own Slav subjects, the Poles, forbidding the use of the Polish language, and expropriating Polish landowners in order to plant a German garrison in the East.  Teutonism is really alarmed at the superior birth-rate and physical vigour of the Slavs; but Russia has not loved Teutonic policy, and there has been an extensive boycott of German goods in Russian Poland.  The promise made by the Tsar, since the beginning of the war, that he would re-create the old Poland, and give it autonomy, shows how far Russia has travelled from the days, not so far distant in point of time, when it was her policy to repress the Poles in conjunction with Germany; and it has made the breach between Germany and Russia final and irreparable.

It is thus obvious that Germany is vitally opposed to the great Slav Empire in South-Eastern Europe and on her own eastern borders.  But why, it may be asked, should Russian policy be linked with English?  Is there any bond of union except the negative bond of common opposition to Germany?  There is.  For one thing England and Russia have sought to pursue a common cause—­that of international arbitration and of disarmament.  If neither has succeeded, it has been something of a bond between the two that both have attempted to succeed.  But there are other and more vital factors.  England, which in 1854-6 opposed and fought Russia for the sake of the integrity of Turkey, has no wish to fight Russia for the sake of a Germanized Turkey.  On the contrary, the interest of England in maintaining independence in the South-East of Europe now coincides with that of Russia.  Above all, the new constitutional Russia of the Duma is Anglophil.