foreigners. It is an indispensable duty of German policy to regain the mouths of that river." Here would be fine fuel for European war.
Russia, too, may furnish no less suitable an illustration of how war may spring from an economic source. The history of Russia is that certain tribesmen living around the sources of the Dnieper have, within the space of a thousand years, expanded into a nation ruling from the Baltic to the Pacific, and from Persia to the Polar Sea. That stupendous exodus had a cause partly economic, and partly political. The tribesmen fled before a niggard nature, and before fiercer man. For nature drove them with the whip of hunger, and their rulers with the knout. Yet in the main the cause was economic, and their wars, arising out of their necessities, have formed some of the bloodiest chapters in the history of humankind. Why, because at the last hour of ten centuries they have procured a Duma and a democracy, should their expansive energies and their aggressions vanish from the page of history? It is too soon to forget Mouravieff Amurski, and the diplomacy of Ignatieff, and the pledges of Gortchakoff. Remember Frederick the Great's prophecy, that all Europe will one day tremble before Russia; or Metternich's saying, that she is forever insatiable; or Palmerston's, that she is the universal aggressor; or Napoleon's, that Europe will be Republican or Cossack. She was the only nightmare of Bismarck.
