cases the contrast between the two sets of demands was disconcerting, and in all it tended to cause misunderstandings and complicate the relations between Kolchak and his Paris agents.  But he continued to give his confidence to his representatives, although they were denied that of the delegates.  It would, of course, be grossly unfair to impute anything like disingenuousness to plenipotentiaries engaged upon issues of this magnitude, but it was an unfortunate coincidence that they were known to regard some of the members of the Russian Council in Paris with disfavor, and would have been glad to see them superseded.  When Nansen’s project to feed the starving population of Russia was first mooted, Kolchak’s Ministers in Paris were approached on the subject, and the Allies’ plan was propounded to them so defectively or vaguely as to give them the impression that the co-operation of the Bolshevist government was part of the program.  They were also allowed to think that during the work of feeding the people the despatch of munitions and other military necessaries to Kolchak and his army would be discontinued.  Naturally, the scheme, weighted with these two accompaniments, was unacceptable to Kolchak’s representatives in Paris.  But, strange to say, in the official notification which the plenipotentiaries telegraphed at the same time to the Admiral direct, neither of these obnoxious riders was included, so that the proposal assumed a different aspect.

Another example of these singular tactics is supplied by their pourparlers with the Admiral’s delegates about the future international status of Finland, whose help was then being solicited to free Petrograd from the Bolshevist yoke.  The Finns insisted on the preliminary recognition of their complete independence by the Russians.  Kolchak’s representatives shrank from bartering any territories which had belonged to the state on their own sole responsibility.  None the less, as the subject was being theoretically threshed out in all its bearings, the members of the Russian Council in Paris inquired of the Allies whether the Finns had at least renounced their pretensions to the province of Karelia.  But the spokesmen of the Conference replied elusively, giving them no assurance that the claim had been relinquished.  Thereupon they naturally concluded that the Finns either still maintained their demand or else had not yet modified their former decision on the matter, and they deemed it their duty to report in this sense to their chief.  Yet the plenipotentiaries, in their message on the subject to Kolchak, which was sent about the same time, assured him that the annexation of Karelia was no longer insisted upon, and that the Finns would not again put forward the claim!  One hardly knows what to think of tactics like these.  In their talks with the spokesmen of certain border states of Russia the official representatives of the three European Powers at the Conference employed language that gave rise to misunderstandings which may have