capitals and made them mere pawns in the great human game.

Some Russians liked the new state of affairs and some did not-notably the military were very wrath; but likes or dislikes were not of much consequence to a man only responsible to an omnipotent Czar for his acts, and therefore allegiance had to be paid him. paid After General Kuropatkin had come and gone, and had been forced to show himself at least outwardly on friendly terms with the Naval Viceroy during that curious visit to the Far East before the outbreak of hostilities, even the military in Manchuria and the Amur Provinces only whispered their grumbles, whilst the diplomats, always of the Forward Party in the decaying Orient, chuckled with glee at the immediate prospect of their wildest dreams being realised, if only the Viceroy remained firm with the little Japanese-as they told him it was very necessary that he should.

There were three of these high diplomats subordinate to the Viceroy, in deed if not in name, the Ministers at the Courts of Peking, of Seoul, and of Tokyo; and with the telegraph strings from these three countries drawn through his powerful fingers, the all-mighty Viceroy, sitting in his commanding Port Arthur residence, from which he viewed the waters of the Yellow seas, controlled the destinies of the East. This was the situation from the Russian point of view.

Of these three Ministers there was but one who

could act much as he pleased in suggesting things and then attempting to carry them out. The Minister

at Peking had the traditional Russian policy to attend to, a policy which is a very complicated and curious thing and cannot be casually dealt with. The Minister at Tokyo was a real admirer and lover of Japan, and being accredited to a country that was efficient in every sense of the word, could obviously not play the part of a bully. Alone the Minister at Seoul, the pantomime capital which had been so long the sport of nations that intrigues had become to it as the breath of life, could properly interpret empire-building wishes. So Viceroy Alexeieff rather carelessly slackened his hold on the PekingTokyo strings and pulled the Seoul line short up.

Monsieur Pavlow, the Seoul Plenipotentiary, had another bond, too, with the portly, short-breathing, Far Eastern Viceroy. He also was a naval man whom the more seductive fields of diplomacy had enticed away from the sea. Only a decade or so before he had arrived in Peking in the train of Count Cassini (the hero of ominous secret treatymaking) as a penniless young ex-naval lieutenant, happy to act the part of private secretary at very few roubles a month. The penniless young man was, however, very clever, and rapidly passed through the successive stages of third, second, and first secretary of Legation, until one day, saturated with Oriental diplomacy, which is very Muscovite in its ways, he had with his own hands appended the signature to the Port Arthur leasing agreement.

From Peking to Seoul is not a far cry in the extreme East, and five years of the Korean capital had seen the ex-naval officer become a full-fledged Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary, with an ambition only whetted by his past successes, and a pride which was born of a sufficiently remarkable career, even for the subject of a country where the remarkable is the commonplace and the commonplace the remarkable.

Admiral Alexeieff, before the brilliance of his rank had increased his portliness and decreased his mobility, had often been to Seoul and Korea, and knew exactly what was wanted there from the Russian point of view. The Czar himself, when he had toured the Far East at the beginning of the 'nineties as an enthusiastic if somewhat youthful Czarewitch, had also passed down the coasts of Korea and understood something of their geography. Thus everyone on the Russian side, contrary to popular opinion, understood the the ManchurianKorean question very thoroughly at the time of the crisis; and everyone, likewise contrary to popular opinion, also understood that the Japanese had to be snubbed flat because they were little and pretentious, and had theories about the Korean Straits theories which they would soon wish to extend, not only to the Hermit Kingdom, but also to Manchuria, which was the very height of impudence. Of course there was mainly bluff in the Russian attitude, but there was also a good deal of other things.

But when the moderates of the Russian bureaucracy were still in power in 1902, the Manchurian evacuation agreement had been signed in Peking in deference to the clamour raised by the AngloSaxon world at the Russian advance. So, as Manchuria was still a Chinese province-on paper -another difficult element was added to the general situation. Solid only by reason of the support he was receiving from St. Petersburg, Admiral Alexeieff was surrounded by all kinds of situations, internal and external, which varied from simple ones to compound complex ones of the most astonishing character, all having to be considered and remembered finally as one grand political situation, after a resorting, revaluation, and relabelling which must never cease-a state of affairs which would have driven an actuary soon crazy, and was quite an impossible one for a naval officer to handle without disaster. And quite apart from all this there were the Japanese negotiations, which, unostentatious but persistent, were like the constant drop of water in their disintegrating effect.

It was whilst things were in this tangled condition, and whilst the few who are keen-nosed were wondering all over the world whether war would really result, and, if so, what kind of war, and whether Russians or Japanese were the things to sell on the stock exchanges, that a distinct Korean attitude began to be adopted by the Russian Minister at Seoul; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the Russian Minister began to

force the adoption of a so-called Russo-Korean attitude, which he considered the irreducible minimum of Russian demands from his diplomatic point of view. There is a great deal in a point of view. All the plotting and scheming for years for a coaling port in Southern Korea had ended in absolute failure-so much the Russians were willing to confess frankly-and Southern Korea would have to be wrestled for one day when the necessary consolidation had taken place over the vast Asiatic hinterland where Russia was intent on entrenching herself. In the same way, all the plotting and planning in Seoul had only resulted in creating a stalemate; for everything had been so honeycombed with intrigue and counter-intrigue, and split up into so many component parts by bribery and corruption, chopping and changing, complete volte-faces, partial volte-faces, and revolving volte-faces that winked at you as they spun round and round, that the political situation almost squelched under foot as you trod the Seoul streets. Something more had to be done, something tangible in the way of a definite programme had to emerge from out of this tangle, for even the Russian, accustomed to startling balancing tricks, could find no firm foothold and was beginning to be tired of it all. That something was nothing more nor less than, first, a firm foothold on the Korean side of the Yalu River, which would bring the distressed capital within two hundred and fifty miles of secured Russian bases; and, secondly, a recognised foothold in Seoul itself, secured by the