o the
ruler of a civilized people.

For the first time in modern Russian history, Peter the Great's
daughter, Anne, married a German Prince in 1725. With that year begins
that close dynastic alliance with the German Courts which has lasted
until our own day. Germany has been carrying on a most thriving export
trade of Princes and Princesses with almost every European
monarchy--an export trade of which she is reaping the enormous
political advantages in the present crisis. But in Russia alone she
has obtained a monopoly of this royal export trade. _All the Russian
Tsars have married German Princesses._ For one hundred and fifty years
the rule suffered no exception until Alexander II. married a daughter
of the Danish Dynasty, which itself is in reality the German Dynasty
of Oldenburg.

I need not emphasize the supreme importance of those close family
relations between the Courts of Russia and Germany, _and especially
between the Courts of Russia and Prussia_. It is the peculiarity of an
autocratic government that the smallest causes are productive of the
greatest consequences, and amongst those smaller causes none are
likely to produce more far-reaching results than the personal likes
and dislikes of the ruler and his family. In the Empire of the Tsars
the sympathies of the ruler and of the Imperial family for a hundred
and fifty years have generally been German. Women have no less
influence in Russia than in other countries, and as every Russian
Princess has, for a hundred and fifty years, been German in origin,
German by training, German by pride of birth, German by prejudice, the
Teutonic influences have necessarily been supreme in the Russian
Court. Nor must we forget that every German Princess coming to
Petrograd would bring with her a numerous suite of ladies-in-waiting
and Court officials, so that the German Court colony was automatically
increasing. Indeed, it is no mere chance that the capital, the
military harbour, and the chief Imperial residences should all have
German names--Kronstadt, Oranienbaum, Schluessenburg, Petersburg, and
Peterhof. Peterhof has been the Russian Potsdam. Petersburg has been
the outpost of Germany in the Russian Empire, the _feste Burg_ of
Prussia until the eve of the war.

III.

From what has been said, it is obvious that the national Romanov
Dynasty, founded in 1613 by Michael Romanov, Patriarch of all the
Russias, ceased to be a Romanov Dynasty at the death of Empress
Elizab