of French and English public men that Russia had assured France and England of the excellent state of the Russian army and had declared that Russia would have no fear of war if France were well prepared. Many an Englishman and Frenchman took the Russian defeats as a failure to fulfil a pledge and, indeed, as deceit. It should, I think, have been the duty of those Westerners who knew Russia to take her assurances less uncritically, for while the war with Japan had obliged the Russian military administration to undertake a more vigorous reorganization of the army, the work had been done on a much smaller scale than was necessary.
In view of this state of mind in Paris, Professor Denis repeated to me a request he had made before-that I should give a lecture on the Slavs at the Sorbonne. It was to be the first of a series of lectures on Slavonic affairs, like those that were already being given at King’s College, London; and he thought that, if I could speak in Paris, my standpoint might reassure the political public about our own endeavours, and those of the Slav peoples generally, by showing that they were not pan-Slav in any aggressive Russian Imperialist sense. In support of his proposal, Denis mentioned the misplaced declarations of Koníček and others, including Dürich, whose zeal for the Russian dynasty, and assurances that the Czech people would embrace Orthodoxy, had made things worse. These views were hawked round Paris as representing the policy of Dr. Kramář; and the pro-Austrians and our opponents in general fastened on them eagerly and turned them to account. Indeed, Austrian and Magyar agents found it easy to approach our ingenuous people from whom they extracted all sorts of sense and nonsense. I believe, too, that in France and England some impression had been made by the assertions of the German Emperor and of Bethmann-Hollweg that Russian pan-Slavism had caused the war. Sympathy with Russia had, moreover, been deadened by the behaviour of Russians, of various party allegiance, in Paris and the West; and when finally a small Russian force came to France, its lack of discipline upset the French, and French military men in particular.
Therefore I gave my lecture on the Slavs and pan-Slavism at the Sorbonne on February 22, 1916. In it I proved that among the Slavs and in Russia there was no Imperialism of the pan-German sort. True, I did not defend Tsarism—but that was no abandonment of the Slav cause. I advocated the creation of an Institute for Slavonic Studies at the Sorbonne, and we founded the scientific Slavonic review, “Le Monde
