Junker-Militarist cliques) wanted to fight; for England had nothing to
gain and Germany had everything to lose, whilst France had given up hope
of her Alsace-Lorraine _revanche_, and would certainly not have hazarded
a war for it. Yet because Russia, who has a great deal to gain by
victory and nothing except military prestige to lose by defeat, had a
quarrel with Austria over Servia, she has been able to set all three
western friends and neighbours shedding "rivers of blood" from one
another's throats; an outrageous absurdity. Fifty years ago the notion
of England helping Russia and Japan to destroy Germany would have seemed
as suicidal as Canada helping the Apaches to destroy the United States
of America; and though we now think much better of the Japanese (and
also, by the way, of the Apaches), that does not make us any the more
patient with the man who burns down his own street because he admires
the domestic architecture of Yokohama, especially when the fire
presently spreads to the cathedral of Rheims. It is bad enough that we
should have betrayed oriental Persia to oriental Russia as we did (and
get nothing for our pains but what we deserved); but when it comes to
sacrificing occidental Germany to her as well, we are sharpening a knife
for our own occidental throat. The Russian Government is the open enemy
of every liberty we boast of. Charles I.'s unsuccessful attempt to
arrest five members of the House of Commons for disagreeing with him is
ancient history here: it occurred 272 years ago; but the Tsar's
successful attempt to arrest thirty members of the Duma and to punish
them as dangerous criminals is a fact of to-day. Under Russian
government people whose worst crime is to find _The Daily News_ a
congenial newspaper are hanged, flogged, or sent to Siberia as a matter
of daily routine; so that before 1906 even the articles in _The Times_
on such events as the assassinations of Bobrikoff and the Grand Duke
were simply polite paraphrases of "Serve him right." It may be asked why
our newspapers have since ceased to report examples of Russia's