ROYAL FELICITATIONS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 145, 21 June 1909, Page 6

ROYAL FELICITATIONS.

The visit which the Kaiser has been paying to the Tsar at Bjorko, off the coast of Sweden, has, at any rate, provided some of the Russian gunners with the opportunity forj some much-needed practice. A British merchantman, which was making her peaceful way up the Gulf of Finland to the Finnish capital, was fired at twice by a Russian torpedoboat, and both the shells hit her. Could the finest navy in the world have done better w r oric ? Apart i rom the sufferings of the poor fellows who were wounded, the serious aspect of the mattei is in the main satisfactory. The attack of "nerves" which was doubtless responsible for the incident has not communicated itself to either of the nations concerned. Their attitude to one another is very different from what it was when, five years ago, the broadsides which Admiral Rozhdestvensky's fleet discharged at the luckless trawlers off the Dogger Bank nearly brought Britain into the field on the side of Japan. The feeling between Britain and Russia is now one of mutual confidence, which has been quite unruffled by the unfortunate incident in the GuU' of Finland, and may also be expected to survive the severer trial of the meeting at Bjorko, which supplied the occasion for the incident. The Kaiser and the Tsar have been exchanging courtesies, which included "hearty assurances of traditional friendship and mutual trust," and tlie Tsar, who mighf naiurally be expected to be the less effusive of the two, and who spoke in French, as a more suitable vehicle of politeness than twentieth-cen-tury German, was kind enough to say that "this is a pledge of good relations between the two countries and of general peace." There is just one word* in these lelicitations which comes very near to giving them all the lie, and that is the word "traditional." Friendship between Germany and Russia is indeed a tradition—a tradition handed down by Bismarck as the very cornerstone of Germany's foreign policy. But what was left of this tradition by the time the German Ambassador had overcome M. Isvolsky's reluctance to recognise unconditionally Austria's piratical grab of Bosnia and Herzegovina by reminding him that Germany was ready for war and Russia was not, and that Geiman troops were already mobilised on the Russian frontier? It will take a good deal more gush than the Kaiser had time for during the Imperial picnic at Bjorko to efface the memory of the frank brutality of that performance and to restore the tradition which he then discarded as ruthlessly as he had discarded its author nineteen years beloie. Russia, therefore, has not been flattered and Britain has not been fluttered by the cordiality of the spoech-making at the luncheon party on the Standart. "The Russian newspapers," we are told 'by Reuter's correspondent at St. Petersburg, "show little enthusiasm over the meeting." The Novoe Vremya thmku tho occasion a good one for publishing "a sympathetic article on the Anglo-Siamese Convention, which it describes as a severe blow to German as>piralions," while the Bourse Gazette declares that "the time is past when Russian policy depends on Berlin." The Kaiser can do many things, but even he cannot both eat his cake and keep it. Even he cannot both bulfy Russia and retain her friendship. ITe hits taught her, by a lesson of which all Europe has been the witness, that so long as she is weak she must expect to bo bullied by the potentate who addiesi-cd her ruler in biich endearing terms at Bjorko, and she lias drawn the proper moral, viz., that ehe must renew her strength and cling more closely to her good friends in the Triple Entente.