German Colonists of Southern and Western Russia were obliged
to sell their land to Russian subjects, and they received ten
months' grace for the purpose.

In Poland there were well over 500,000 German colonists, besides a
large number of new-comers, whose unwritten "privileges" included, as
we saw, occasional permission to their young men liable to serve a few
weeks annually in the ranks of the German army to discharge that duty
under German officers in Russian Poland! In the Ukraine and the most
fertile districts of the Volga basin hundreds of thousands of Germans
lived, throve, and upheld the traditions as well as the language of
the Fatherland, under the eyes of tolerant local authorities.

Hard by old Novgorod, the once famous Russian republic and cradle of
the Russian State, a number of German colonists settled some 150 years
ago. The population of two of these settlements numbers several
thousand souls, descendants of the original settlers, in the fourth
and fifth generation. They had had time enough, one would think,
during that century-and-a-half to assimilate Russian ways and to
acquire a thorough knowledge of the Russian tongue. Well, these
colonists do not speak the language of the country in which they and
their forbears have been living for over 150 years! They still
consider themselves German, and if you ask them who their sovereign is
they answer unhesitatingly--Kaiser Wilhelm! During Russia's recent
military reverses, which threatened for a time to culminate in the
capture of Riga, and possibly of Petrograd as well, these parasites in
the body politic of Russia displayed their joy in various unseemly
ways, which aroused the indignation of their Slav neighbours. In one
of their schools the Russian visiting authorities were received with
demonstrations of hostility. It is usual for the portrait of the
Russian Tsar to be set up in every school in the Empire. In one of
these educational establishments it was discovered in the lavatory
with the eyes gouged out.

Long before this war Berlin had become alive to the importance of
these colonies as factors in the work of pacific interpenetration and
political propaganda. Wandering teachers from the Fatherland were
accordingly sent among them to link them up with their brethren at
home, and fan the embers of patriotism which long residence in the
Tsardom had not quenched. Little by little, the political fruits of
these apostolic labours began to show t