Mr. Balfour, in the House of Commons on Wednesday, replied
at length to the Pacificist demand for a re-statement of our war aims. He rebuked Mr. Ponsonby in severe terms for declaring that the chaos in Russia was the result of our faulty and " selfish " diplomacy. The Government had, he said, welcomed the Russian Revolution with enthusiasm and hope that had been little justified up to the present. Our war aims, which were in general those of President Wilson, were in no sense " selfish." As for the secret treaties wrongly published at Petrograd, we had no selfish aim in agreeing that Russia should have Constantinople, or (as was arranged by the Liberal Government in 1907) a sphere of in- fluence in Persia, or that Italy should obtain Trieste, or that Poland should be united. As for the proposed buffer-State on the Rhine between France and Germany, the Foreign Office know nothing of it, did not approve of it, and (lid not believe that France favoured such a scheme.
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