nor too discreet to speak out. Certainly he was not afraid of not being
believed. Yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops. He
meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has
set the clock of peace back for many a year.

He had his way. The German Empire has been an accomplished fact for more
than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy left to the world
by the ill-omened phantom of Russia's might.

It is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly,
astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the
East has always been famous. The pretence of belief in its existence
will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now Prince Bismarck is dead)
unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this
_Neant_ making an armed descent upon the plains of India. That sort of
folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the
real problem created for Europe by a war in the Far East.

For good or evil in the working out of her destiny, Russia is bound to
remain a _Neant_ for many long years, in a more even than a Bismarckian
sense. The very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to
consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in Central
Europe by its help and connivance.

The German Empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always
amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first
instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible
obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There is a removal
of that latent feeling of restraint which the presence of a powerful
neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is