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162 press. I am done as a correspondent! What a debacle! What a debacle!

"Witte smiled as if nothing had happened, asked me to sit down, and said in his rather hoarse and halting voice:

"'It's true that the Novoye Vremia is compromised. It's true that for a month you will be the laughing stock of the world. And it is also true that your reputation as a special correspondent has gone to the dogs. But it is not true what you say of the debacle. For you must know how it all really happened. You see, I knew the Japs would intercept your code. As soon as you sent to your editor in Petersburg the cable saying that I would not sign the Peace Treaty, the Japs read the cable and were scared. If the correspondent of the most influential paper cables it so positively to his editor, who is his father as well; if that correspondent goes off to New York to play tennis, they thought, then no change of our position could be expected. The Japs were right in their deductions and yielded.'"

Thus Witte, in order to achieve a higher aim, sacrificed the career of a good and devoted friend. Such methods were quite common with him, and the Ministers and under-secretaries in his Cabinet often suffered through it.

When Witte came to the conclusion that the mood of the great masses of the town population after the Russo-Japanese war threatened revolution, which was