disregard of the political principles we are supposed to stand for. The
answer is simple. It was in 1906 that we began to lend Russia money, and
Russia began to advertise in _The Times_. Since then she has been
welcome to flog and hang her H.G. Wellses and Lloyd Georges by the dozen
without a word of remonstrance from our plutocratic Press, provided the
interest is paid punctually. Russia has been embraced in the large
charity of cosmopolitan capital, the only charity that does not begin at
home.


*The Russian Russians and Their Prussian Tsars.*

And here I must save my face with my personal friends who are either
Russians or discoverers of the soul of the Russian people. I hereby
declare to Sasha Kropotkin and Cunninghame Graham that my heart is with
their Russia, the Russia of Tolstoy and Turgenieff and Dostoieffsky, of
Gorki and Tchekoff, of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Drury Lane Ballet,
of Peter Kropotkin and all the great humanitarians, great artists, and
charming people whom their very North German Tsars exile and imprison
and flog and generally do what in them lies to suppress and abolish. For
the sake of Russian Russia, I am prepared to strain every point in
Prussian Russia's favour. I grant that the Nihilists, much as we loved
them, were futile romantic people who could have done nothing if
Alexander II. had abdicated and offered them the task of governing
Russia instead of persecuting them and being finally blown to bits by
them. I grant that the manners of the Fins to the Russians are described
as insufferable both by the Swedes and the Russians, and that we never
listened to the Russian side of that story. I am ready to grant Gilbert
Murray's plea that the recent rate of democratic advance has been
greater in Russia than anywhere else in Europe, though it does remind me