Russian domination has often been cruelly heavy for the smaller nationalities which it has swallowed up. But how comes it then, Germans, that the Poles prefer it to yours? Do you imagine that Europe is ignorant of the monstrous way in which you are exterminating the Polish race? Do you think that we do not receive the confidences of those Baltic nations who, having to choose between two conquerors, prefer the Russian because he is the more humane? Read the following letter which I received but lately from a Lett, who, though he has suffered severely at the hands of the Russians, yet sides ardently with them against you. My German friends, you are either strangely ignorant of the state of mind of the nations which surround you, or you think us extremely simple and ill-informed. Your imperialism, beneath its veneer of civilisation, seems to me no less ferocious than Tsarism towards everything that ventures to oppose its avaricious desire for universal dominion. But whereas immense and mysterious Russia, overflowing with young and revolutionary forces, gives us hope of a coming renewal, your Germany bases its systematic harshness on a culture too antiquated and scholastic to allow of any hope of amendment. If I had any such hope—and I once
