rst
rank laid claim, is matter for doubt. It is certain that he disliked war
on account of the evil results accruing from the Russo-Turkish conflict;
but whether his love of peace rested on grounds other than prudential
will be questioned by those who remember his savage repression of
non-Russian peoples in his Empire, his brutal treatment of the
Bulgarians and of their Prince, his underhand intrigues against Servia
and Roumania, and the favour which he showed to the commander who
violated international law at Panjdeh. That the French should enshrine
his memory in phrases to which their literary skill gives a world-wide
vogue is natural, seeing that he ended their days of isolation and saved
them from the consequences of Boulangism; but it still has to be proved
that, apart from the Schnaebele affair, Germany ever sought a quarrel
with France during the reign of Alexander III.; and it may finally
appear that the Triple Alliance was the genuinely conservative league
which saved Europe from the designs of the restless Republic and the
exacting egotism of Alexander III.

Another explanation of the Franco-Russian _entente_ is fully as tenable
as the theory that the Czar based his policy on the seventh beatitude. A
careful survey of the whole of that policy in Asia, as well as in
Europe, seems to show that he drew near to the Republic in order to
bring about an equilibrium in Europe which would enable him to throw his
whole weight into the affairs of the Far East. Russian policy has
oscillated now towards the West, now towards the East; but old-fashioned
Russians have always deplored entanglement in European affairs, and have
pointed to the more hopeful Orient. Even during the pursuit of
Napoleon's shattered forces in their retreat from Moscow in 1812, the
Russian Commander, Kutusoff, told Sir Robert Wilson that Napoleon's
overthrow would benefit, not the world at large, but only England[272].
He failed to do his utmost, largely because he looked forward to peace
with France and a renewal of the Russian advance on India.

[Footnote 272: _The French Invasion of Russia_, by Sir R. Wilson, p.
234.]

The belief that England was the enemy came to be increasingly held by
leading Russians, especially, of course, after the Crimean War and the
Berlin Congress. Russia's true mission, they said, lay in Asia. There,
among those ill-compacted races, she could easily build up an Empire
that never could be firmly founded on tough, recal