e than sixty thousand Russians alone would perish in
this war, not so much from the enemy's fire as from disease--nor
that he would himself be amongst their number."

One hardly believes that this could have been, so senseless and dreadful
is it,--and yet it was; sixty thousand maintainers of their families lost
their lives owing to the will of those men. And now the same thing is
taking place.

In order not to let the Japanese into Manchuria, and to expel them from
Korea, not ten thousand, but fifty and more thousands will, according to
all probability, be necessary. I do not know whether Nicholas II and
Kuropatkin say like Dibitch in so many words that not more than fifty
thousand lives will be necessary for this on the Russian side alone, only
and only that; but they think it--they cannot but think it, because the
work they are doing speaks for itself; that ceaseless stream of
unfortunate, deluded Russian peasants now being transported by thousands
to the Far East--these are those same not more than fifty thousand live
Russian men whom Nicholas Romanoff and Alexis Kuropatkin have decided
they may get killed, and who will be killed, in support of those
stupidities, robberies, and every kind of abomination which were
accomplished in China and Korea by immoral ambitious men now sitting
peacefully in their palaces and expecting new glory and new advantage and
profit from the slaughter of these fifty thousand unfortunate, defrauded
Russian workingmen guilty of nothing and gaining nothing by their
sufferings and death. For other people's land, to which the Russians have
no right, which has been criminally seized from its legitimate owners,
and which, in reality, is not even necessary to the Russians--and also
for certain dark dealings by speculators, who in Korea wished to gain
money out of other people's forests--many millions of money are spent,
_i.e._ a great part of the labor of the whole of the Russian people,
while the future generations of this people are bound by debts, its best
workmen are withdrawn from labor, and scores of thousands of its sons are
mercilessly doomed to death; and the destruction of these unfortunate men
is already begun. More than this: the war is being managed by those who
have hatched it so badly, so negligently, all is so unexpected, so
unprepared, that, as one paper admits, Russia's chief chance of success
lies in the fact that it possesses inexhaustible human material. It is
u