It is Germany's interest, I believe, to foster and continue and promote
that condition of disorder. Those who watch her methods throughout the
world know that she always wishes to encourage disorder in every other
country but her own. If the country is a republic she wishes to
introduce absolutism; if it is an absolutist Government then she seeks
to encourage republicanism. She counts it her gain that other
Governments should be weak, and she knows that there is no better way of
making other countries weak than by making them divided--a house divided
against itself. Therefore I believe that Germany unchecked will do her
best to continue those disorders which have unhappily stained the path
of the Russian revolution.
What must be the result? The result must be--especially in a country
where the sense of national unity appears, at all events, for the
moment to be singularly weak compared with that which prevails in other
civilized countries--that men will at last look around and say to
themselves, "This disorder is intolerable; it makes life impossible;
human effort cannot go on; something must be done, good or bad, to put
an end to mere chaos." There will therefore be classes in Russia, some
with patriotic motives, but some with personal and selfish motives, who
will welcome anything in the world which gives them the semblance of a
stable, orderly, and civilized Government.
When that time comes, then I can see Germany will say, Now we will step
in; we will, by both the open and subterranean methods which we have
developed and cultivated, now exercise our power in the country. We will
re-establish, possibly in the same form, possibly in some new form, the
autocracy which we in this House hoped had gone forever; and you will
have in a Russia shorn of some of its fairest provinces set up again an
autocracy far worse than the old autocracy, because it will lean upon a
foreign power to continue its existence. Then, indeed, if that prophecy
came to pass--and I most earnestly hope I am in this a false
prophet--all our dreams of Russian development and Russian liberty would
be gone. Russia under this Government would be a mere echo of the
Central Powers; she would cease to be a make-weight in any sense to
German militarism. She would have lost all that initiative, all that
power for self-development that we so earnestly hoped the revolution had
given her.