Of course the student saw whole continents of study opened to
him by the Kaiser's coup d'etat. Carefully as he had tried to
follow the Kaiser's career, he had never suspected such
refinement of policy, which raised his opinion of the Kaiser's
ability to the highest point, and altogether upset the centre of
statesmanship. That Germany could be so quickly detached from
separate objects and brought into an Atlantic system seemed a
paradox more paradoxical than any that one's education had yet
offered, though it had offered little but paradox. If Germany
could be held there, a century of friction would be saved. No
price would be too great for such an object; although no price
could probably be wrung out of Congress as equivalent for it. The
Kaiser, by one personal act of energy, freed Hay's hands so
completely that he saw his problems simplified to Russia alone.
Naturally Russia was a problem ten times as difficult. The
history of Europe for two hundred years had accomplished little
but to state one or two sides of the Russian problem. One's year
of Berlin in youth, though it taught no Civil Law, had opened
one's eyes to the Russian enigma, and both German and French
historians had labored over its proportions with a sort of
fascinated horror. Germany, of all countries, was most vitally
concerned in it; but even a cave-dweller in La Fayette Square,
seeking only a measure of motion since the Crusades, saw before
his eyes, in the spring of 1903, a survey of future order or
anarchy that would exhaust the power of his telescopes and defy
the accuracy of his theodolites.
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