oves us, in our own self-interest if for no higher
motive, to try and understand the spirit and ideals of a great people, who,
as they did a century ago at the time of Napoleon, are once again coming
forward to assist Europe in ridding herself of a military despotism.

Sec.1. _The Russian State._--Many of us do not realise the most obvious facts
about Russia. For example, our atlases, which give us Europe on one page
and Asia on another, prevent us from grasping the most elementary fact of
all--her vastness. Mr. Kipling has told us that "East is East and West
is West, and never the twain shall meet." But Russia confounds both Mr.
Kipling and the map-makers by stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.
For her there is not Europe and Asia but one continent, and she is the
whole _inside_ of it. All Europe between the four inland seas, and all Asia
north of lat. 50 deg. (and a good deal south of it too)--that is Russia, a
total area of 8-1/4 million square miles! This enormous country, which
comprises one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe, is at present thinly
populated; it has roughly 20 persons to the square mile as against 618 to
the square mile in England and Wales. Yet for all that it contains the
largest white population of any single state on earth, numbering in all
171 million souls. Moreover, this population is increasing rapidly; it
has quadrupled itself during the last century, and with the advent of
industrialism the increase is likely to be still more rapid. Many among us
alive to-day may see Russia's population reach and perhaps pass that of
teeming China. As yet, however, industrialism is only at its beginning in
Russia; more than 85 per cent of the inhabitants live in the country, as
tillers of the soil.

It will be at once evident that this fact gives her an immense advantage
over industrial nations in time of war. She has, on the one hand, an almost
inexhaustible supply of men to draw upon, while, on the other hand, her
simple economic structure is hardly at all affected. A great European war
may mean for a Western country dislocation of trade, hundreds of mills and
pits standing idle, vast masses of unemployed, leading to distress, poverty
and in the end starvation; for Russia it means little more than that the
peasants grow fat on the corn and food-stuffs which in normal times they
would have exported to the West. Furthermore, her geographical and economic
circumstances render Russia ultimately in