hemselves: the colonists, whose
main preoccupation had been to occupy the most fertile soil in the
district, began to take over the approaches to Russia's strategic
plans, and to display an absorbing interest in Russian politics.
Several Zemstvos fell into their hands, and were practically
controlled by them, and they contrived to gain considerable influence
in the elections to the Duma.

The chance of a useful part for these German colonies to perform
having thus unexpectedly arisen on the horizon, they seized it with
promptitude and utilized it with the thoroughness that characterizes
their race. The numbers prosperity, and influence of the colonies grew
rapidly. Land that had belonged to the Russian peasantry was taken
over by the foreign parasites, and while the Tsar's Minister, were
toiling and moiling to transport hundreds of thousands of Russian
husbandmen and their families in search of land beyond the Ural
Mountains to the virgin forests of Eastern Siberia, there in the very
heart of European Russia were hundreds of thousands of intruders,
who, with the help of their German Colonial banks, were acquiring
additional tracts of land from which their native owners had been
ousted.

I pointed out this anomaly over and over again, and long before the
war I described it in review articles. The well-known German
Professor, Hans Delbrueck, replied shortly afterwards, in the
_Contemporary Review_,[38] denying point-blank the truth of my
statements, which were drawn from official sources, and confirmed by
the evidence of my senses. For I had visited several of the colonies
in question. Besides these German settlements, there had also been a
number of German industrial and commercial establishments in the
Empire which, at first nowise harmful, were afterwards taken in hand
by emissaries from Berlin, linked up together, affiliated to one or
other of the great financial houses of Germany, and transformed into
redoubtable instruments of Teuton domination. Capital was subscribed,
syndicates were formed, railway-building and electro-technical
industries were organized, Russia's railways policy modified, and
metallurgical works were monopolized by the Germans. Here again
financial institutions discharged the functions of motive power. At
the beginning, about thirty million roubles were subscribed for the
creation of banks, and by dint of push, importunity, secret influence
and intrigue, these institutions received on deposit