Eastern Europe: she
has irritated Slav feeling on her own Eastern frontier. The vitality and
the increase of the Slavs in Eastern Germany has excited deep German
alarm. The German Government has therefore of late years pursued a
policy of repression towards its own Slav subjects, the Poles,
forbidding the use of the Polish language, and expropriating Polish
landowners in order to plant a German garrison in the East. Teutonism is
really alarmed at the superior birth-rate and physical vigour of the
Slavs; but Russia has not loved Teutonic policy, and there has been an
extensive boycott of German goods in Russian Poland. The promise made by
the Tsar, since the beginning of the war, that he would re-create the
old Poland, and give it autonomy, shows how far Russia has travelled
from the days, not so far distant in point of time, when it was her
policy to repress the Poles in conjunction with Germany; and it has made
the breach between Germany and Russia final and irreparable.

It is thus obvious that Germany is vitally opposed to the great Slav
Empire in South-Eastern Europe and on her own eastern borders. But why,
it may be asked, should Russian policy be linked with English? Is there
any bond of union except the negative bond of common opposition to
Germany? There is. For one thing England and Russia have sought to
pursue a common cause--that of international arbitration and of
disarmament. If neither has succeeded, it has been something of a bond
between the two that both have attempted to succeed. But there are other
and more vital factors. England, which in 1854-6 opposed and fought
Russia for the sake of the integrity of Turkey, has no wish to fight
Russia for the sake of a Germanized Turkey. On the contrary, the
interest of England in maintaining independence in the South-East of
Europe now coincides with that of Russia. Above all, the new
constitutional Russia of the Duma is Anglophil.

'The political ideals both of Cadets and Octobrists were learnt
chiefly from England, the study of whose constitutional history had
aroused in Russia an enthusiasm hardly intelligible to a present-day
Englishman. All three Dumas ... were remarkably friendly to England,
and England supplied the staple of the precedents and parallels for
quotation.'[24]

In a word, the beginnings of Russian constitutionalism not only
coincided in time with the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, but owed
much to the inspiration