At dinners and luncheons given in M. Poincare's honour the
British Ambassador was the only guest who was not a Russian or a Frenchman—a signal proof of the desire of the Russian Government to emphasize the intimacy of British relations with the Dual Alliance. The Paris correspondent of the Times says that as regards the proposed railway from the interior of Asia Minor to the Black Sea, of which France holds the concession, Russia desires that it should he kept at a sufficient distance from the frontier of the Caucasus. Her fear, of course, is that it might be used for strategic purposes by Turkey. Other questions dis- cussed seem to have been the Chinese Loan, the state of the Balkans, the Anatolian Railway, the trans-Persian Railway, and the rebuilding of the Russian Fleet, and, in connexion with that, the Franco-Russian Naval Convention. We have written of the subject elsewhere, and will only repeat here
that the fact most worth insisting on is that Germany has caught the echoes of those private conversations—so different from the graceful but external civilities at Baltic Port— without any apparent annoyance.
