ble peace or a solid
League of Nations as long as Russia continued to be a prey to anarchy.
But even with the prizes and penalties before their eyes to entice and
spur them, they proved unequal to the task of devising an intelligent
policy. Fitful and incoherent, their efforts were either incapable of
being realized or, when feasible, were mischievous. Thus, by degrees,
they hardened the great Slav nation against the Entente.

The reader will be prepared to learn that the overtures made to the
Bolsheviki kindled the anger of the patriotic Russians at home, who had
been looking to the Western nations for salvation and making veritable
holocausts in order to merit it. Every observer could perceive the
repercussion of this sentiment in Paris, and I received ample proofs of
it from Siberia. There the leaders and the population unhesitatingly
turned for assistance to Japan. For this there were excellent reasons.
The only government which throughout the war knew its own mind and
pursued a consistent and an intelligible policy toward Russia was that
of Tokio. This point is worth making at a time when Japan is regarded as
a Laodicean convert to the invigorating ideas of the Western peoples, at
heart a backslider and a potential schismatic. She is charged with
making interest the mainspring of her action in her intercourse with
other nations. The charge is true. Only a Candide would expect to see
her moved by altruism and self-denial, in a company which penalizes
these virtues. Community of interests is the link that binds Japan to
Britain. A like bond had subsisted between her and Tsarist Russia. I
helped to create it. Her statesmen, who have no taste for sonorous
phraseology, did not think it necessary to give it a more fashionable
name. This did not prevent the Japanese from being chivalrously loyal to
their allies under the strain of powerful temptations, true to the
spirit and the letter of their engagements. But although they made no
pretense to lofty purpose, their political maxims differ nowise from
those of the great European states, whose territorial, economic, and
military interests have been religiously safeguarded by the Treaty of
Versailles. True, the statesmen of Tokio shrink from the hybrid
combination of two contradictions linked together by a sentimental
fallacy. Their unpopularity among Anglo-Saxons is the result of
speculations about their future intentions; in other words, they are
being punished, as certain