n. Yorck at Tauroggen, when he suddenly abandoned the
French and went over to the Prussians, and while Russia has within half
a generation become intensely bitter against Germany, yet it is true
that the Baltic Provinces, in which the gentry and the burghers are
Germans, have furnished most important administrators to the Russian
Empire, a fact that causes much of the jealousy in Russia on the part of
the native-born Russians against the Germans of the Baltic Provinces.
Nevertheless, self-interest is a very important thing, and if Russia
thought for a moment that France was going to abandon her I think she
would turn to Germany right away.

As time has developed the nations of today, it has come to be understood
by hard-headed statesmen that those who conduct their respective affairs
can have no other guiding principle than the interest of their own
State, no other.

There is a persistent feeling throughout the world that there is an
analogy between the individual man and organized society. There are
books written to show that States must and do pass through the various
stages through which an individual passes, namely, infancy, childhood,
youth, middle age, old age, decay. By a perfectly natural parallel the
majority of men apply the same morality to the State which they apply to
the individual, and they insist upon it that a State must be moral in
every respect; that it must have a conscience; that it must have virtue;
that it must practice self-denial; that it must not lay its hands on
what does not belong to it. In short, that it must as a State or as a
nation be "good," in exactly the same sense in which a person is "good."
In other words, they personify the State.

I have never heard of any speaker or writer who would not approve of
that as an ideal, and who would not desire that the millennium should
come upon earth now, and that exactly the same virtues that are held up
for personal ideals should be held up for national ideals.

I think we all believe that, but, as a matter of fact, in a world
constituted as ours is, the one test of a good Government, applied by
every individual, is the material prosperity of the people who live
under it, and for that reason if the people do not at first put in power
men who can give them material prosperity they will put such failures
out and try another set of rulers, and they will go on and on that way
until necessarily the policies of statesmen must be based upon the
int