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Rh equally anti-German since the retirement of Sir Frank Lascelles. Should the improvement in Anglo-German relations become permanent there was grave risk that if matters in the Balkans were pushed to the issue the Franco-Russian combination must face the Teutonic Powers alone. France might even draw back at the last moment. For Jaurés was a great influence steadily directed against the French people becoming the catspaw of Tsarist ambition and the victims of the megalomania of those in power at the Elysée and Quai d'Orsay. For Petrograd this meant the postponement of schemes on whose execution the fate of Tsardom depended. So the net must be drawn tighter and tighter. It closed with the Conference in Paris of April 24 (1914), when Sir Edward Grey, in the company of M. Doumergue (the French Premier) and M. Paul Cambon (French Ambassador in London), consented to graft upon the eight-year-old secret collaboration between the heads of the British and French armies and navies, collaboration between the British and Russian Admiralties. The jubilation of Russia's Foreign Minister is shown in his communication to the Tsar found in the Russian archives by the Revolutionary Government, and in the triumphant note in the organ of the French Foreign Office, Le Temps.

The Russian naval agents in London began their discussion of the plan for invading Pomerania, so dear to Lord Fisher, the despatch of transports to the Baltic, and so on. A complete mobilisation of all the Russian reserves of the three annual contingents of 1907, 1908 and 1909 was ordered for the whole Empire under the form of "exercises" (May). On June 13 the Petrograd Bourse Gazette, the organ of the Minister of War, came out with its famous announcement: "Russia is ready: France must be ready." A fortnight later the Serbian "Black Hand," in the closest touch with M. de Hartwig, Russian Minister at Belgrade, and probably subsidised by him, crowned its long list of murders and terrorist acts by executing its long matured and planned assassination of the Archduke Francis Joseph.

The hour had struck.

Thus was the "peace of Great Britain left at the mercy of the Russian Court," and the British people went