It will be recalled that the great war was caused in the first place by the unprovoked attack of Austria on Serbia and the unwillingness of Russia to stand by and see her little neighbor crushed, and that England came in to make good her word, pledged to Belgium, to defend that small country from all hostile attacks.  Thus the nations of the Entente posed before the world as the defenders of small nations and as champions of the rights of peoples to live under the form of government which they might choose.  You will remember that when the central powers said that they were ready to talk peace terms the nations of the Entente replied that there could be no peace as long as the Danes, Poles, and Alsatians were forcibly held by Germany in her empire and as long as Austria denied the Ruthenians, Roumanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, and Italians in their empire the right either to rule themselves or to join the nations united to them by ties of blood and language.  France and Great Britain especially were fond of saying that it was a war of the free peoples against those enslaved by military rule—­a conflict between self-governed nations and those which were oppressing their foreign subjects.  Replying to this the central powers would always point to Russia.  Russia, said they, oppressed the Poles and Lithuanians, the Letts, the Esthonians, the Finns.  She, as well as Austria-Hungary, has hundreds of thousands of Roumanians within her territories.  Her people had even less political freedom than the inhabitants of Austria and Germany.

The nations of the Entente did not reply to these charges of the Germans.  There was no reply to make; it was the truth.  In fact there is no doubt that French and British statesmen were afraid of a Russian victory.  They did not want the war to be won by the one nation in their group which had a despotic form of government.  On the other hand the high officials in Russia were not any too happy at the thought of their alliance with the free peoples of western Europe.  Germany was much more their ideal of a country governed in the proper manner than was France.  As you have been told, many of the nobles of the Russian court were of German blood and secretly desired the victory of their fatherland, while many Russians of the party who wanted to keep all power out of the hands of the common people were afraid of seeing Germany crushed, for fear their own people would rise up and demand more liberty.

You will recall that there had been unrest in Russia at the time of the outbreak of the war; that strikes and labor troubles were threatened, so that many people thought the Czar had not been at all sorry to see the war break out, in order to turn the minds of his people away from their own wrongs.