was
informed late in July that the British Foreign Office held that he must
resign his commission in the British-Indian army before accepting the
post. This Major Stokes did, by cable, on July 31st, and the matter was
regarded as settled.

What was my surprise, therefore, to learn, on the evening of August
8th, that the British Minister, following instructions from his
Government, had that day presented a note to the Persian Foreign
Office, warning the Persian Government that any attempt to employ Major
Stokes in the "northern sphere" of Persia (which included Teheran, the
capital) would probably be followed by _retaliatory action_ (_sic_) by
Russia which England would not be in a position to deprecate. Between
individuals, such action would clearly be considered bad faith. Sir
Edward Grey, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, shortly
thereafter explained that the appointment of Major Stokes would be a
violation of what he termed the "spirit" of the Anglo-Russian
Convention of 1907. Yet just two weeks before, when he consented to
Stokes resigning to accept the post, he had never dreamed of such a
thing.

The truth is that the semiofficial St. Petersburg press, like the
_Novoe Vremya_, had begun to bluster about the affair, egged on by the
Russian Foreign Office, and Sir Edward Grey was compelled to _invent
some pretext_ for his manifest dread of displeasing Britain's "good
friend Russia" about anything. Hence the birth of that wondrous and
fearsome child, that rubber child which could be stretched to cover any
and all things, the "spirit of the convention." It was a wonderful
discovery for the gentlemen of the so-called "forward party" of the
Russian Government, since they now beheld not only a new means of
evading the plain letter of their agreement, but gleefully found a
woful lack of spirit in their partner to the convention, Great Britain.

The British Foreign Office pretended to believe that they had checked
Russia's march to the Gulf; they knew better then, and they know still
better now. There is but one thing on earth that will check that march,
and that thing England is apparently not in a geographical or a
policial position to furnish in sufficient numbers. The British public
now know this, and unfortunately the "forward party" in Russia knows
it, and that is why bearded faces at St. Petersburg crack open and emit
rumbles of genuine merriment every time Sir Edward Grey stands up in
the House of