were the principles upon which it was administered, the
real strength of this empire was far greater than it appeared. But
beyond question it was ill-prepared and ill-organised for war; desiring
peace beyond all things, and having given internal peace to one-quarter
of the earth's population, it was apt to be over-sanguine about the
maintenance of peace. And if a great clash of empires should come, this
was likely to tell against it.

The second oldest--perhaps it ought to be described as the oldest--of
the world-empires, and the second largest in area, was the Russian
Empire, which covered 8,500,000 square miles of territory. Its strength
was that its vast domains formed a single continuous block, and that
its population was far more homogeneous than that of its rivals, three
out of four of its subjects being either of the Russian or of kindred
Slavonic stock. Its weaknesses were that it was almost land-locked,
nearly the whole of its immense coastline being either inaccessible, or
ice-bound during half of the year; and that it had not adopted modern
methods of government, being subject to a despotism, working through an
inefficient, tyrannical, and corrupt bureaucracy. In the event of a
European war it was further bound to suffer from the facts that its
means of communication and its capacity for the movement of great
armies were ill-developed; and that it was far behind all its rivals in
the control of industrial machinery and applied science, upon which
modern warfare depends, and without which the greatest wealth of
man-power is ineffective. At the opening of the twentieth century
Russia was still pursuing the policy of Eastward expansion at the
expense of China, which the other Western powers had been compelled to
abandon by the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Able to bring
pressure upon China from the landward side, she was not deterred by the
naval predominance which this alliance enjoyed, and she still hoped to
control Manchuria, and to dominate the policy of China. But these aims
brought her in conflict with Japan, who had been preparing for the
conflict ever since 1895. The outcome of the war (1904), which ended in
a disastrous Russian defeat, had the most profound influence upon the
politics of the world. It led to an internal revolution in Russia. It
showed that the feet of the colossus were of clay, and that her
bureaucratic government was grossly corrupt and incompetent. It forbade
Russia to tak