His brilliant mastery of the Russian language is a harder thing to believe; but, as nothing is said of an interpreter, I must suppose that he had been quietly and painfully taking lessons in this very difficult tongue.  Anyhow, you must picture him, at some spot not specified, addressing a concourse of enthusiastic Revolutionaries.  I propose to give a brief summary of his speech, from which you will gather that he spoke to them like a father, and that, while he showed a cordial sympathy with the cause of Russian freedom, he did not hesitate to deliver himself of some very straight home-truths.

“Friends, Russians, Allies,” he began; “I come on behalf of my fellow-countrymen” (you know his touching way of regarding himself as the medium of the best intelligence to be found in the British Empire) “to convey their affectionate sympathy with you in your triumph over the tyranny of Tsardom.  At first we took the natural and hopeful view that your Revolution, supported by all that was noblest in all ranks of your society, was the result of bitter dissatisfaction with the conduct of the War, and with the secret and sinister enemy influences which were at work to ruin your chances in the common fight against Kaiserism.

“Yet it was immediately followed by wholesale desertions from the firing-line and a general disintegration of military discipline.  It seems, then, that we were wrong; for otherwise it would be a curious irony that a movement designed for the better conduct of the War should produce a complete stagnation on your fighting fronts; or, to look at it from another point of view, that a Revolution which owed its success to the War, since, in such a war as this, the Army and the nation are one, should have, for its immediate consequence, an apparent failure on your part to remember the purpose for which the War is being fought.

“No doubt many motives were at work, and it was perhaps natural that in the joy of your new-found freedom you should be tempted to forget the conditions that had made it possible, and to regard the War as something outside and remote, and its importance as small compared with the achievement of internal liberty.

“Well, we have tried patiently to see things with your eyes, and now you in your turn must please make an effort to see them with ours.  From the first, when we in England took on this War, we recognised that the country which was bound to get most good out of it was Russia.  For her we hoped that it was to be in the fullest sense a War of Liberation.  Your Allies would win liberty from external menace, but you would also see the bonds of internal tyranny broken.  The TSAR, the little father of his people, had a chance, such as falls to few, of giving to his nation something of the true freedom that we in England know.

“He missed his chance.  We will not ask why, but he missed it.  Yet by other means the War has been for you a War of Liberation, and, if you break your pledge to see it through, you do not deserve your freedom.  Nay more, you run the risk of losing it; or, if, through the steadfastness of your sworn Allies, you keep it, then you keep it at the cost of sacrificing the friendship and sympathy of all free nations who are fighting in the cause of liberty; and, on those terms, your own freedom is not worth having.