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xxiv. And to reach Constantinople the Tsardom must have Austria and her partner Germany beneath its feet. For the rôles had changed. It was no longer the Anglo-Saxon who blocked the path to a secular ambition which had now become a question of life and death to the Muscovite autocracy: but the Teuton. Indeed there was a chance that the Anglo-Saxon might be won over to assist, through the medium of France. To that end Tsardom directed its incessant efforts, using as its chief weapon Isvolsky, Russian Ambassador in Paris, who was on terms of great personal intimacy with Poincaré, President of the French Republic, and with Tittoni, the astute ex-Foreign Minister of Italy, Italian Ambassador in Paris.

Thus these two short years of effort to reconstruct a bridge between Britain and Germany were vitiated by the gradually tightening chains in which British diplomacy had entangled itself since the secret Morocco deal. Those chains were henceforth to be duplicated. French foreign policy was in the hands of men ripe for war: Nationalists filled with the revived passions of a national humiliation nearly half a century old. The Belgian despatches leave no room for doubt on that score. These men—Poincaré, Millerand, Delcassé—were confident that those in whose hands real power rests in Britain were with them, supported as the latter were by the leaders of the Opposition and by the entire Unionist Press. The army chiefs and the heads of the Admiralty they knew were with them. The plan of campaign had been prepared so minutely as to include arrangements for the refreshment of an Expeditionary Force along the road to its appointed stations! Between France and Tsarist Russia there was forged a bond of no uncertain character. It was a formal alliance in peace and war. The wires were set working. British diplomacy had been steadily drawing nearer to Tsarist Russia for years past—ever since our Foreign Office bartered Egypt against Morocco.

A tremendous struggle, totally unseen and unsuspected by the British people, raged from July, 1912, to April, 1914. It was a struggle waged by Tsardom and official France for the capture of the British Foreign Office—for the person of the Foreign Secretary primarily, because the bulk of the permanent staff were pro-Russian, pro-French and anti-German, and barely disguised their sentiment. The British Embassy in Paris had become