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234 foreign policy of the country, and of eventually deflecting the currents of public opinion.

II complicated and contradictory relations between the two countries can be summed up very briefly. On the one hand, there existed before the war the closest intercourse between the Russian and the German courts, and that close intercourse extended to the army, to the bureaucracy, to the universities, to the industrial and commercial classes. On the other hand, the Russian and the German people are mutually repellent. There is a temperamental antagonism between the two nations, between the dour disciplined Prussian and the easy-going, undisciplined Russian. In the province of ideas, of art and literature, French influence is dominant amongst the intellectual and in the upper classes, but as literature counts for very little, and as trade and industry, the bureaucracy and the court count for a very great deal, and as all these social and political forces hitherto were almost entirely controlled by the Germans, it may be said that before the war German influence was supreme in the Russian Empire.