day? An ally she has yet who more than any other of Russia's allies has
found that it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for a
shadow. It is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest
that the modern world had ever known--and the most overbearing. But it
is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its
place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction, and no
doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the
moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the
French people.

Two neighbours Russia will find at her door. Austria, traditionally
unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of
uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an
uncertain, bilingual phrase. Prussia, grown in something like forty
years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil
counsellor of Russia's masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong
hand to the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only
with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her
substance.

Pan-Germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and Germany is anything
but a _Neant_ where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves
without sound or trace. It is a powerful and voracious organisation,
full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement
will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed
members of its friends and neighbours. The era of wars so eloquently
denounced by the old Republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic
ambitions is by no means over yet. They will be fought out differently,
with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage tooth-
and-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence. They will make us regret