It is a truism to repeat in a different form what Messrs. Lloyd George and Wilson repeatedly affirmed, but apparently without realizing what they said:  that the peace which they regard as the crowning work of their lives deserves such value as it may possess from the assumption that Russia, when she recovers from her cataleptic fit, will be the ally of the Powers that have dismembered her.  If this postulate should prove erroneous, Germany may form an anti-Allied league of a large number of nations which it would be invidious to enumerate here.  But it is manifest that this consummation would imperil Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia, and sweep away the last vestiges of the peace settlement.  And although it would be rash to make a forecast of the policy which new Russia will strike out, it would be impolitic to blink the conclusions toward which recent events significantly point.

In April a Russian statesman said to me:  “The Allied delegates are unconsciously thrusting from them the only means by which they can still render peace durable and a fellowship of the nations possible.  Unwittingly they are augmenting the forces of Bolshevism and raising political enemies against themselves.  Consider how they are behaving toward us.  Recently a number of Russian prisoners escaped from Germany to Holland, whereupon the Allied representatives packed them off by force and against their will to Dantzig, to be conveyed thence to Libau, where they have become recruits of the Bolshevist Red Guards.  Those men might have been usefully employed in the Allied countries, to whose cause they were devoted, but so exasperated were they at their forcible removal to Libau that many of them declared that they would join the Bolshevist forces.

“Even our official representatives are seemingly included in the category of suspects.  Our Minister in Peking was refused the right of sending ciphered telegrams and our charge d’affaires in a European capital suffered the same deprivation, while the Bolshevist envoy enjoyed this diplomatic privilege.  A councilor of embassy in one Allied country was refused a passport visa for another until he declared that if the refusal were upheld he would return a high order which for extraordinary services he had received from the government whose embassy was vetoing his visa.  On the national festival of a certain Allied country the charge d’affaires of Russia was the only member of the diplomatic corps who received no official invitation.”

One day in January, when a crowd had gathered on the Quai d’Orsay, watching the delegates from the various countries—­British, American, Italian, Japanese, Rumanian, etc.—­enter the stately palace to safeguard the interests of their respective countries and legislate for the human race, a Russian officer passed, accompanied by an illiterate soldier who had seen hard service first under the Grand Duke Nicholas, and then in a Russian brigade in France.  The soldier gazed wistfully at the