THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER SCARF.

Evening Star, Issue 7449, 18 February 1888, Page 2

THE RUSSIAN FRONTIER SCARF.

It may seem to some people a hard thing that, just as Europe is quieting down from the excitement of a possible coup d’etat in France, just as it has ceased to be a matter of anxious concern whether some members of the Orleans family lias or has not been taking Prince Bismarck’s signature in vain, a fresh scare should be started as to the massing of Russian troops on the Austrian frontier. > But this surprise, or resentment, or whatever it is to be called, will hardly be shared by those who understand either the proximate or the ultimate causes of these periodical scares, recurring, as they undoubtedly do now, with an ever ■ shortening interval of periodicity. In the first place, foreign politics occupy a relatively larger place—a very much larger place—in the business and the thoughts of foreign journalists than they do with us; and when there is nothing real to talk about it is necessary to make up something fanciful, whether it be a movement in the cantonments of tho Russian Army on the Galician frontier or a piece of rudeness on the part of the German representative at Sofia. In the second place, though Heaven knows that stock exchange gambling is common enough in England, stock exchange gambling of thepoliticaTkind is certainly more rife on the Continent (Europe), especially in transactions of the “outside” character ; and the relations between brokers and journalists are decidedly more intimate. Anything is better for practitioners of this kind than stagnation; and though it is hard to see why rumors which in ninty-nine cases out of a hundred are certainly unimportant, and in perhaps nineteen out of twenty are, and are pretty clearly jrnpwn to be, manufactured, should affept pripes, they do so affect them, and bring grist tp thp jpill of the spepulator accordingly. So that cyi bono .-—in its true, not its lady-novelist and gutter-journalist sense—gives a cprtain clue.—‘Saturday Review,’ December 10.