mend sick engines. They are now coming to the mending, not of
sick engines merely, but of engines on which post-mortems have already
been held. They are actually mending engines, parts of which have
already been taken out and used for the mending of other engines. There
are consequently abnormal demands for such things as shafts and piston
rings. They are particularly short of Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. In
normal times the average number of new tubes wanted for each engine put
through the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15 for engines used in the more
northerly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines in the south where the
water is not so good). This number must now be taken as much higher,
because during recent years tubes have not been regularly renewed.
Further, the railways have been widely making use of tubes taken from
dead engines, that is to say, tubes already worn. Putting things at
their very best, assuming that the average demand for tubes per engine
will be that of normal times, then, if 1,000 engines are to be repaired
monthly, 150,000 tubes will be wanted every six months. Now on the
15th of June the total stock of tubes ready for use was 58,000, and the
railways could not expect to get more than another 13,000 in the
near future. Unless the factories are able to do better (and their
improvement depends on improvement in transport), railway repairs must
again deteriorate, since the main source of materials for it in Russia,
namely the dead engines, will presently be exhausted.

On this there is only one thing to be said. If, whether because we do
not trade with them, or from some other cause, the Russians are unable
to proceed even in this first stage of their programme, it means an
indefinite postponement of the moment when Russia will be able to export
anything, and, consequently, that when at last we learn that we need
Russia as a market, she will be a market willing to receive gifts, but
unable to pay for anything at all. And that is a state of affairs a
great deal more serious to ourselves than to the Russians, who can,
after all, live by wandering about their country and scratching the
ground, whereas we depend on the sale of our manufactured goods for the
possibility of buying the food we cannot grow ourselves. If the Russians
fail, their failure will affect not us alone. It will, by depriving her
of a market, lessen Germany's power of recuperation, and consequently
her power of fulfilling her engageme