The reader will be prepared to learn that the overtures made to the Bolsheviki kindled the anger of the patriotic Russians at home, who had been looking to the Western nations for salvation and making veritable holocausts in order to merit it.  Every observer could perceive the repercussion of this sentiment in Paris, and I received ample proofs of it from Siberia.  There the leaders and the population unhesitatingly turned for assistance to Japan.  For this there were excellent reasons.  The only government which throughout the war knew its own mind and pursued a consistent and an intelligible policy toward Russia was that of Tokio.  This point is worth making at a time when Japan is regarded as a Laodicean convert to the invigorating ideas of the Western peoples, at heart a backslider and a potential schismatic.  She is charged with making interest the mainspring of her action in her intercourse with other nations.  The charge is true.  Only a Candide would expect to see her moved by altruism and self-denial, in a company which penalizes these virtues.  Community of interests is the link that binds Japan to Britain.  A like bond had subsisted between her and Tsarist Russia.  I helped to create it.  Her statesmen, who have no taste for sonorous phraseology, did not think it necessary to give it a more fashionable name.  This did not prevent the Japanese from being chivalrously loyal to their allies under the strain of powerful temptations, true to the spirit and the letter of their engagements.  But although they made no pretense to lofty purpose, their political maxims differ nowise from those of the great European states, whose territorial, economic, and military interests have been religiously safeguarded by the Treaty of Versailles.  True, the statesmen of Tokio shrink from the hybrid combination of two contradictions linked together by a sentimental fallacy.  Their unpopularity among Anglo-Saxons is the result of speculations about their future intentions; in other words, they are being punished, as certain of the delegates at the Conference have been eulogized, not for what they actually did, but for what it is assumed they are desirous of achieving.  Toward Russia they played the same game that their allies were playing there and in Europe, only more frankly and systematically.  They applied the two principal maxims which lie at the root of international politics to-day—­do ut des, and the nation that is capable of leading others has the right and the duty to lead them.  And they established a valuable reputation for fulfilling their compacts conscientiously.  Nippon, then, would have helped her Russian neighbors, and she expected to be helped by them in return.  Have not the Allies, she asked, compelled Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia to pay them in cash for their emancipation?