A crusade is afoot: they go, they are gone, to preach "the gospel of
the sacred person of William II." A holy war is declared, to be waged
against a people which declines to fight. Never mind, they will find a
way to glory, be it only in the size of the slices of territory which
they will seize.
The two great conceptions of our Minister of Foreign Affairs are to act
as the honest broker in China between St. Petersburg and Berlin, and to
put the European Concert to rights. How often have I not told him that
all he has to gain by playing this game is a final surrender on the
part of France? Alas! my prophecy, already fulfilled in the East, is
very near to coming true in the Far East. If it should prove
otherwise, it would not be to anything in our foreign policy that our
good luck would be due, but to the fact that all Russia has come to
realise that she is likely to be Germany's dupe in the Far East, as she
has been in the East.
During the reign of the Emperor Alexander III and the Presidency of M.
Carnot, the Franco-Russian Alliance possessed a definite meaning,
because both these rulers understood that any pro-German tendencies in
their mutual policy must have constituted an obstacle to the perfect
union of the national policies of their two countries. France had
ceased to indulge in secret flirtations with Germany when the latter
was no longer Russia's ally. The plain and inevitable duty of our
Government was to promote an antagonism of interests between Germany
and Russia and to prove to the latter that France was loyally working
to promote her greatness above all else, on condition that she should
help us to hold our own position.
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