odious far, because its authors claimed to be considered as the devoted friends of their victims and the champions of right.  Whereas the Brest-Litovsk Treaty provided for a federative Slav state, with provincial diets and a federal parliament, the system substituted by the Allies consisted in carving up Russia into an ever-increasing number of separate states, some of which cannot live by themselves, in debarring the inhabitants from a voice in the matter, in creating a permanent agency for foreign intervention, and ignoring Russia’s right to reparation from the common enemy.  The Russians were not asked even informally to say what they thought or felt about what was being done.  This province and that were successively lopped off in a lordly way by statesmen who aimed at being classed as impartial dispensers of justice and sowers of the seeds of peace, but were unacquainted with the conditions and eschewed investigation.  Here, at all events, the usual symptoms of hesitancy and procrastination were absent.  Swift resolve and thoroughness marked the disintegrating action by which they unwittingly prepared the battlefields of the future.

Nobody acquainted with Russian psychology imagines that the feelings of a high-souled people can be transformed by gifts of food, money, or munitions made to some of their fellow-countrymen.  How little likely Russians are to barter ideal boons for material advantages may be gathered from an incident worth noting that occurred in the months of April and May, when the fall of the capital into the hands of the anti-Bolshevists was confidently expected.

At that time, as it chanced, the one thing necessary for their success against Bolshevism was the capture of Petrograd.  If that city, which, despite its cosmopolitan character, still retained its importance as the center of political Russia, could be wrested from the tenacious grasp of Lenin and Trotzky, the fall of the anarchist dictators was, people held, a foregone conclusion.  The friends of Kolchak accordingly pressed every lever to set the machinery in motion for the march against Peter’s city.  And as, of all helpers, the Finns and Esthonians were admittedly the most efficacious, conversations were begun with their leaders.  They were ready to drive a bargain, but it must be a hard and lucrative one.  They would march on Petrograd for a price.  The principal condition which they laid down was the express and definite recognition of their complete independence within frontiers which it would be unfruitful here to discuss.  The Kolchak government was ready to treat with the Finnish Cabinet, as the de facto government, and to recognize Finland’s present status for what it is in international law; but as they could not give what they did not possess, their recognition must, they explained, be like their own authority, provisional.  A similar reply was made to the Esthonians; to this those peoples demurred.  The Russians stood firm and the negotiations fell through.  It is to be supposed that when they have recovered their former status they will prove more amenable to the blandishments of the Allies than they were to the powerful bribe dangled before their eyes by the Esthonians and the Finns?