commercial organization. Even to-day you will meet in Moscow
unassuming Russian merchants leading the simplest of lives and
possessed of enormous wealth. But the Russian merchant is generally
conservative, un-enterprising, a bad linguist, and servilely attached
to ancient usages. He is scarcely a match for the foreigner. In recent
years British and Belgian traders as well as Jews and Armenians have
shared in the enormous trade of the Russian Empire, _but the Germans
have secured the lion's share_.

And what is true of Russian trade is equally true of Russian industry.
The liberal economic policy of Witte has created in one generation
powerful industrial centres in Central Russia, and especially in
Poland. Here, again, the Germans have benefited more than all their
competitors together. Lodz, the "Manchester of Russian Poland," has
ceased to be either Polish or Russian, and has become a German
manufacturing town. Caprivi, Bismarck's successor, negotiated with the
Russian Government a treaty of commerce which gave enormous advantages
to German industry, and if the German Government had continued to show
the wisdom of Bismarck and Caprivi, Germany would certainly have
profited more than any other country by the commercial expansion of
the Russian Empire.

XIII.

It might have been expected that a German influence so absolutely
supreme in every sphere of society, in every walk of life, should have
extended to the lower classes. But the common people were never
affected by German methods and remained untainted by the German
spirit. To the Russian moujik, the German remained the _Niemets_, the
mute, the alien enemy. The Russian peasant, with his simple ways and
his child-like faith, a mystic and an idealist, has an instinctive
antipathy to the modern Prussian, who is an implacable realist,
selfish, calculating, and aggressive. The persistence with which the
Russian people have resisted and escaped Prussian influence is not the
least convincing proof of the soundness of the Slav character.

XIV.

We have seen German influence supreme in the province of the
practical, the tangible, the useful. It is all the more remarkable
that it should be insignificant in the sphere of the ideal and of the
beautiful. In Art and Literature the influence of Germany has been
purely superficial, although the beautiful Russian language has often
been spoiled by the influence of a cumbrous German syntax. With the
exception of Nietzsche,