premature arrangement will, if
the Allies emerge victorious from the ordeal, thrust into the
foreground of practical politics a whole group of problems the most
delicate and dangerous that were ever yet tackled by the inadequately
equipped diplomacy of the Allied Governments. It is then that the
Entente Powers will fully realize the deluge to which they made such
haste to open the sluice-gates in the spring of 1915. And the only way
practicable out of this blind alley would be the spontaneous
abandonment by the Russian Government of the right it possesses, which
however the Allies will certainly never call in question. Whether the
Tsar's Government believes such a sacrifice necessary, and whether,
if they did, they could summon up the courage requisite to make it,
are questions which Russia's loyal allies have neither the right nor
the wish to raise. We will carry out our obligations in the letter and
the spirit. If the Russian people, in the person of their responsible
organ, should renounce for the moment the claims which we have
formally recognized and undertaken to enforce, this decision will have
been come to spontaneously and without pressure or advice from their
allies.

The extent to which the Teuton had his own way among the easy-going
Russian people is hardly to be realized. It would be certainly
inexplicable in an empire governed on national lines and conscious of
its mission. For unlimited pliancy was the quality which German
importunity evoked on the part of the highest authorities. One of many
examples is worth recording. Among all industrial enterprises the
Russian Government is most sensitive about that of high explosives.
The manufacture of these they had always rigorously reserved for their
own people, on obvious grounds. Well, the moment the Germans resolved
to break down this barrier, they found the means to do it despite the
objection raised by the Russian Press that it would be dangerous to
confide the production of high explosives to foreigners and
superlatively dangerous to confide it to prospective enemies. The
prospective enemy carried the point, and the manufacture of high
explosives was handed over to a German company, which built works for
the purpose near the Russian capital, and had its headquarters and
board of directors in Berlin![44]

[44] _Novoye Vremya_, June 24, 1915.

As in Italy, so in the Tsardom, one of the principal levers of Teuton
interpenetration was the regulation o