William II looks upon history as a vulgar photographic plate designed for the purpose of “taking” him in all his poses and in such places as he may select and appoint.

A crusade is afoot:  they go, they are gone, to preach “the gospel of the sacred person of William II.”  A holy war is declared, to be waged against a people which declines to fight.  Never mind, they will find a way to glory, be it only in the size of the slices of territory which they will seize.

The two great conceptions of our Minister of Foreign Affairs are to act as the honest broker in China between St. Petersburg and Berlin, and to put the European Concert to rights.  How often have I not told him that all he has to gain by playing this game is a final surrender on the part of France?  Alas! my prophecy, already fulfilled in the East, is very near to coming true in the Far East.  If it should prove otherwise, it would not be to anything in our foreign policy that our good luck would be due, but to the fact that all Russia has come to realise that she is likely to be Germany’s dupe in the Far East, as she has been in the East.

During the reign of the Emperor Alexander III and the Presidency of M. Carnot, the Franco-Russian Alliance possessed a definite meaning, because both these rulers understood that any pro-German tendencies in their mutual policy must have constituted an obstacle to the perfect union of the national policies of their two countries.  France had ceased to indulge in secret flirtations with Germany when the latter was no longer Russia’s ally.  The plain and inevitable duty of our Government was to promote an antagonism of interests between Germany and Russia and to prove to the latter that France was loyally working to promote her greatness above all else, on condition that she should help us to hold our own position.  If France had been governed as she should have been, had we possessed a statesman at the Quai d’Orsay, our diplomatic defeats at Canea, Athens and Constantinople, though possibly inevitable, might have found a Court of Appeal; and France would finally have been in a position of exceptional advantage in securing a judgment favourable to our alliance.

Germany’s brutal seizure in China of a naval station that the Chinese Government had leased to Russia for the purposes of a winter harbour for her fleet, foreshadows the sort of thing that William II is capable of doing, under cover of an entente, so soon as Japan comes to evacuate Wei-hai-wei, upon China’s payment of the war indemnity.  Germany’s scruples in dealing with “sick men,” remind one of the charlatans who either kill or cure, according to their estimate of their prospects of being able to grab the inheritance.

[1] La Nouvelle Revue, January 15, 1896, “Letters on Foreign Policy.”

[2] La Nouvelle Revue, March 1, 1896, “Letters on Foreign Policy.”

[3] La Nouvelle Revue, June 1, 1896, “Letters on Foreign Policy.”