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i9i4j GERMAN INTRIGUES 261
only exempt from the slightest tinge of hostility or
coldness, but was marked by graciousness and kindness.
And the few Russians who also had occasion to meet
her at this time had the same experience.
Queen Victoria’s health and her prolonged absences
from the country have prevented her, more than her
origin, from becoming really Swedish; but her
intelligence, her deep culture, and her high moral qualities
have all the same caused her to gain an ascendancy as
much over her new family as over Swedish society and
—up to a point—over the country.
In taking possession of Sweden little by little,
German policy was not only obeying the dictates of
Pan-Germanism, and of German economic interests. It was
also prcouring a desirable ally in case of a rupture with
Russia, a rupture of which the first idea dates from 1875,
and from the help given that year to France by the
vigilance of Prince Gortchakoff and the generous
intercession of Alexander II.
Since then, relations between Russia and Germany
had been subject to many fluctuations. Sometimes the
old traditions of the Holy Alliance appeared to be
renewed ; sometimes, on the other hand, the coldness
between St. Petersburg and Berlin became accentuated.
Neither the Court at Potsdam nor Germany generally
really wished for war with Russia; they would much
have preferred an intimacy and an alliance based on the
old foundations of trickery on the one side and
ingenuousness on the other. But as they had begun to
work in Sweden on certain lines, they continued this
work from Berlin with consistent stubbornness, without
worrying as to whether at the moment they were on
distant or good terms with Russia. If war between the
two powerful Empires was to break out all the same,
Germany would possess an ally that was not to be despised
in the shape of Sweden, who would go and bite the
bear’s ear on the Finland side; if, on the contrary, the
friendship between Tsarskoe-Selo and Potsdam was
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