ery North German Tsars exile and imprison
and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For
the sake of Russian Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in
Prussian Russia's favour. I grant that the Nihilists, much as we loved
them, were futile romantic people who could have done nothing if
Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing
Russia instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by
them. I grant that the manners of the Fins to the Russians are described
as insufferable both by the Swedes and the Russians, and that we never
listened to the Russian side of that story. I am ready to grant Gilbert
Murray's plea that the recent rate of democratic advance has been
greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does remind me
a little of the bygone days when the Socialists, scoring 20 votes at one
general election and forty at the next, were able to demonstrate that
their gain of 100 per cent. was immensely in excess of the wretched two
or three per cent. that was the best the Unionists or Liberals could
shew. I am willing to forget how short a time it is since Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman said: "The Duma is dead: long live the Duma!" and
since we refused to allow the Tsar to land in England when his ship was
within gangway's length of our shore, on which occasion I myself held up
the Anglo-Russian agreement for the partition of Persia to the
execration of a crowd in Trafalgar Square, whilst our Metropolitan
Police snatched the _l'sarbeleidigend_ English newspapers from the
sellers and tore them up precisely in the Cossack manner. I have an
enormous relish for the art of Russia; I perceive a spirit in Russia
which is the natural antidote to Potsdamnation; and I like most of the
Russians I know quite unaffectedly. I could find it in my heart to
reproach the Kaiser for making war on the Russia of these delightful
people, just as I like to think that at this very moment good Germans
may be asking him how he can bring himself to discharge shrapnel at the
England of Bernard Shaw and Cunninghame Graham. History may not forgive
him for it; but the practical point at the moment is that he does it,
and no doubt attributes the perfidy of England to the popularity of our
works. And as we have to take the Kaiser as we find him, and not as the
Hohenzollern legend glorifies him, I have to take the Tsar as I find
him. When we fight the Kaiser we are not fighting B