LOUBET IN ST. PETERSBURG.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11975, 26 May 1902, Page 4

LOUBET IN ST. PETERSBURG.

Not being accustomed to embrace one another, even upon the most stirring occasions, men of British race are inclined to belittle as spurious the emotional display of national affiliation and personal feeling indulged in by Russians and French at Marseilles and by French and Russians at St. Petersburg. But these Continental habits which excite our insular disdain do not alter the reality and strength of the Russo-French alliance or weaken the significance of the exchange of visits between the autocratic ruler of the Muscovites and the democratic ruler of the Franks. That alliance is one of the most potential factors in the political world and one which every State on the earth has to reckon with the moment it enters upon a foreign policy. It affects the Newfoundland fisheries question. It affects the New Hebrides question. It affects acutely the Anglo-Japanese policy in the Farthest East. For Russia and France are much more closely bound together than are.Britain and Japan. Whoever touches one, touches both, not merely in Korea, but in any part of the world. If Russia by advances in Eastern Asia assails Japan and compels the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to take action against her, we have at once a pretty little local French war on our hands, with plenty of work for our contingents in Pacific waters and in protecting our own ports. Optimistic critics may say that Russia simply exchanges a captious support of French claims for the flotation in Paris of otherwise unfloatable Russian loans. But the Triple Alliance takes no such easy view of Russo-Frankish relations. Underneath the visits of Tsar to Paris and President to St. Petersburg there is the close union made by the having of common enemies and of interests which do not perpetually clash.