Although
England has repeatedly proposed to Germany naval agreements, these
agreements were avowedly meant to perpetuate the overwhelming
preponderance of England's fighting power, so that she would at any
moment be in a position to crush German commercial rivalry for all time.
She apparently thinks that this moment has now come.
That Germany's third implacable enemy, Russia, is clearly the aggressor,
and not the defender of her own national existence, need hardly be
demonstrated. She poses as the guardian of the Balkan States. But is
there any case on record where Russia has really protected the
independence of smaller neighboring countries? Has she not crushed out
provincial and racial individuality wherever she has extended her power?
Is it not the sole aim of her national policy to Russianize forcibly
every nationality under her sway?
In Finland she has gone back on her solemnly pledged word to maintain
the Finnish Constitution, and is ruthlessly reducing one of her most
highly developed provinces to the dead level of autocratic rule. In her
Baltic provinces she is trying to destroy, root and branch, whatever
there is left of German culture.
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