Russian civilization German and Austrian civilization is our
civilization: there is no getting over that. A constitutional kingship
of Poland and a sort of Caliphate of the Slavs in remapped southeastern
Europe, with that access to warm sea water which is Russia's common
human right, valid against all Balances of Power and Keys to India and
the like, must be her reward for her share in the war, even if we have
to nationalize Constantinople to secure it to her. But it cannot be too
frankly said at the outset that any attempt to settle Europe on the
basis of the present hemming in of a consolidated Germany and German
Austria by a hostile combination of Russia and the extreme states
against it, would go to pieces by its own inherent absurdity, just as it
has already exploded most destructively by its own instability. Until
Russia becomes a federation of several separate democratic States, and
the Tsar is either promoted to the honourable position of hereditary
President or else totally abolished, the eastern boundary of the League
of Peace must be the eastern boundary of Swedish, German, and Italian
civilization; and Poland must stand between it and the quite different
and for the moment unassimilable, civilization of Russia, whose
friendship we could not really keep on any other terms, as a closer
alliance would embarrass her as much as it would embarrass us.
Meanwhile, we must trust to the march of Democracy to de-Russianize
Berlin and de-Prussianize Petrograd, and to put the nagaikas of the
Cossacks and the riding-whips with which Junker officers slash German
privates, and the forty tolerated homosexual brothels of Berlin, and all
the other psychopathic symptoms of overfeeding and inculcated insolence
and sham virility in their proper place, which I take to be the dustbin.

*Driving Capital Out of the Country*.

But I must here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable
opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and
west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and
the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not
really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an
enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west
and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at
root absolutely unpatriotic, even absolutely conscienceless products of
commercial finance; and the Balance of Power theories