ves to
confer with the delegates of the Allied and Associated Powers on
Prince's Islands. It is difficult to discuss the expedient seriously.
One feels like a member of the little people of yore, who are reported
to have consulted an oracle to ascertain what they must do to keep from
laughing during certain debates on public affairs. It exposed its
ingenuous authors to the ridicule of the world and made it clear to the
dullest apprehension that from that quarter, at any rate, the Russian
people, as a whole, must expect neither light nor leading, nor
intelligent appreciation of their terrible plight. There is a sphere of
influence in the human intellect between the reason and the imagination,
the boundary line of which is shadowy. That sphere would seem to be the
source whence some of the most extraordinary notions creep into the
minds of men who have suddenly come into a position of power which they
are not qualified to wield--the _nouveaux puissants_ of the world of
politics.

To the credit of the Supreme Council it never let offended dignity stand
between itself and the triumph of any of the various causes which it
successively took in hand. Time and again it had been addressed by the
Russian Bolshevist government in the most opprobrious terms, and accused
not merely of clothing political expediency in the garb of spurious
idealism, but of giving the fore place in political life to sordid
interests, over which a cloak of humanitarianism had been deftly thrown.
One official missive from the Bolshevist government to President Wilson
is worth quoting from:[266] "We should like to learn with more precision
how you conceive the Society of Nations? When you insist on the
independence of Belgium, of Serbia, of Poland, you surely mean that the
masses of the people are everywhere to take over the administration of
the country. But it is odd that you did not also require the
emancipation of Ireland, of Egypt, of India, and of the Philippines....

"As we concluded peace with the German Kaiser, for whom you have no more
consideration than we have for you, so we are minded to make peace with
you. We propose, therefore, the discussion, in concert with our allies,
of the following questions: (1) Are the French and English governments
ready to give up exacting the blood of the Russian people if this people
consent to pay them ransom and to compensate them in that way? (2) If
the answer is in the affirmative, what ransom would the Al