From the military point of view an ultimate union of forces between Russia and Germany is greatly feared in some quarters.  This would be much more likely to take place in the event of reactionary movements being successful in each of the two countries, whereas an effective unity of purpose between Lenin and the present essentially middle-class Government of Germany is unthinkable.  On the other hand, the same people who fear such a union are even more afraid of the success of Bolshevism; and yet they have to recognize that the only efficient forces for fighting it are, inside Russia, the reactionaries, and, outside Russia, the established forces of order and authority in Germany.  Thus the advocates of intervention in Russia, whether direct or indirect, are at perpetual cross-purposes with themselves.  They do not know what they want; or, rather, they want what they cannot help seeing to be incompatibles.  This is one of the reasons why their policy is so inconstant and so exceedingly futile.

The same conflict of purpose is apparent in the attitude of the Council of the Allies at Paris towards the present Government of Germany.  A victory of Spartacism in Germany might well he the prelude to Revolution everywhere:  it would renew the forces of Bolshevism in Russia, and precipitate the dreaded union of Germany and Russia; it would certainly put an end to any expectations which have been built on the financial and economic clauses of the Treaty of Peace.  Therefore Paris does not love Spartacus.  But, on the other hand, a victory of reaction in Germany would be regarded by every one as a threat to the security of Europe, and as endangering the fruits of victory and the basis of the Peace.  Besides, a new military power establishing itself in the East, with its spiritual home in Brandenburg, drawing to itself all the military talent and all the military adventurers, all those who regret emperors and hate democracy, in the whole of Eastern and Central and South-Eastern Europe, a power which would be geographically inaccessible to the military forces of the Allies, might well found, at least in the anticipations of the timid, a new Napoleonic domination, rising, as a phoenix, from the ashes of cosmopolitan militarism.  So Paris dare not love Brandenburg.  The argument points, then, to the sustentation of those moderate forces of order, which, somewhat to the world’s surprise, still manage to maintain themselves on the rock of the German character.  But the present Government of Germany stands for German unity more perhaps than for anything else; the signature of the Peace was, above all, the price which some Germans thought it worth while to pay for the unity which was all that was left them of 1870.  Therefore Paris, with some hopes of disintegration across the Rhine not yet extinguished, can resist no opportunity of insult or indignity, no occasion of lowering the prestige or weakening the influence of a Government, with the continued stability of which all the conservative interests of Europe are nevertheless bound up.