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In due course he was called to Petrograd, where he was introduced to the Emperor, and later on the mantle of Count Witte had fallen upon him. Though in high favour with the Emperor he was clever enough to court the good graces of Rasputin, knowing full well what supreme influence he wielded over the Imperial couple.
As far back as the year 1906 the late Count Witte and myself made a guess at the time-distance which the nation still had to traverse, assuming the rate of progress to be constant, before reaching the abyss. This, however, was mere guesswork, which one of the many possibilities and in especial change in the speed-rate might belie.
In the year 1905-06, when the upshot of the conflict between Tsarism and the revolution was still doubtful, Count Witte and I often admired the marvelous intuition of the great novelist, whose gallery of portraits in the "Devils" seemed to have become suddenly endowed with life, and to be conspiring, shooting, and bomb-throwing in the streets of Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa, and Tiflis.
I hope to be undisturbed to-day, but by to-morrow this will be impossible." The king prophesied aright: Madame Witte was zealously engaged in telling her friends the important news that the King of Prussia had visited her husband, and was now in Amsterdam.
I believe Madame Witte would rather have thrown me out of the house than allowed me to enter this sacred room with my shoes on." "No, your majesty, no. She would " At this moment the door opened, and Madame Witte, drawn by the loud voice of her husband, entered the room. "Wife!" he cried, rising, "come forward; fall on your knees and plead for forgiveness."
Witte opened the campaign by inaugurating the process of peaceful penetration, but his remarkable efforts were neutralized and defeated by his own sovereign. The Japanese, after the Manchurian campaign, which they had done everything possible to avoid, contrived wholly to eliminate Russian aggression from the Far East.
Two years more and the negotiations on this burning topic would have been inaugurated, and there is little doubt in my mind there was none in the mind of the late Count Witte that the upshot of these conversations would have been a Russo-German war.
And the advances made by Ito and others would have been reciprocated by Witte and Lamsdorff were it not that the Tsar, interested in Bezobrazoff's Yalu venture, subordinated his policy to those vested interests, and compelled Japan to fight.
He had seen Mr. de Witte and Prince Khilkoff turn artificial energy to the value of three thousand million dollars, more or less, upon Russian inertia, in the last twenty years, and he needed to get some idea of the effects.
But the remarkably erratic minor planet, Eros, discovered by Witte in 1898, approaches the earth within 15,000,000 miles at rare intervals, and, with the aid of photography, will certainly give us the best result. A large number of observatories combined to observe the opposition of 1900.
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