[585]. It is singular that even Count Lamsdorff should thus participate in the characteristic plaint of the Russians that they are an object of unjust machinations of other nations.
[586]. N.-R., No. 3, received at Tokio on August 6.
[587]. These men were, according to Article 2 of the Statutes of September 30, “the Ministers of the Interior, of Finance, of Foreign Affairs, and of War, the head of the Ministry of Marine, and such persons as His Majesty the Emperor may find it expedient to summon, either to sit permanently on the committee, or to take part temporarily at its meetings. The Viceroy of the Far East, being, by his duties, a member of the committee, shall be present at the meetings when he is in St. Petersburg.”
[588]. The British Parliamentary Papers: China, No. 2 (1904), No. 144.
[589]. Ibid., No. 155.
[590]. After the opening of hostilities in February of the present year, the Russian Foreign Office made a statement of Russia’s case, in which it was said that, when the Japanese Government proposed in August, 1903, to open the negotiations, “Russia consented, and Viceroy Alexieff was charged to draw up a project for a new understanding with Japan in coöperation with the Russian Minister at Tokio....” See p. [327], note 9, below.
[591]. N.-R., No. 6.
[592]. Evidently the reference is to the three Russo-Japanese agreements concerning Korea concluded in 1896 and 1898.
[593]. N.-R., No. 3, originally dated Tokio, August 6.
[594]. N.-R., No. 7.