ard the Allies, who first
drained her life-blood and then abandoned her prostrate body to beasts
of prey. Some part of the hatred engendered might have been mitigated if
representatives of the provisional Russian government had been admitted
to the Conference. A statesman would have insisted upon opening at least
this little safety-valve. It would have helped and could not have harmed
the Allies. It would have bound the Russians to them. For Russia's
delegates, the men sent or empowered by Kolchak and his colleagues to
represent them, would have been the exponents of a helpless community
hovering between life and death. They could and would have gone far
toward conciliating the world-dictators, to whose least palatable
decisions they might have hesitated to offer unbending opposition. And
this acquiescence, however provisional, would have tended to relieve the
Allies of a sensible part of their load of responsibility. It would also
have linked the Russians, loosely, perhaps, but perceptibly, to the
Western Powers. It would have imparted a settled Ententophil direction
to Kolchak's policy, and communicated it to the nation. In short, it
might have dispelled some of the storm-clouds that are gathering in the
east of Europe."

But the Allies, true to their wont of drifting, put off all decisive
action, and let things slip and slide, for the Germans to put in order.
There were no Russians, therefore, at the Conference, and there lies no
obligation on any political group or party in the anarchist Slav state
to hold to the Allies. But it would be an error to imagine that they
have a white sheet of paper on which to trace their line of action and
write the names of France and Britain as their future friends. They are
filled with angry disgust against these two ex-Allies, and of the two
the feeling against France is especially intense.[287]

It is a truism to repeat in a different form what Messrs. Lloyd George
and Wilson repeatedly affirmed, but apparently without realizing what
they said: that the peace which they regard as the crowning work of
their lives deserves such value as it may possess from the assumption
that Russia, when she recovers from her cataleptic fit, will be the ally
of the Powers that have dismembered her. If this postulate should prove
erroneous, Germany may form an anti-Allied league of a large number of
nations which it would be invidious to enumerate here. But it is
manifest that this consummation woul