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 invincible from the military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812.  She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy.  Russia has much to gain from a great European war and hardly anything to lose.

At first sight, therefore, there seems to be a great deal in favour of the theory, somewhat widely held at the moment, that to crush Germany and Austria will be to lay Europe at the feet of Russia, and that when Germany has been driven out of France and Belgium, the Allies in the West might have to patch up a peace with her in order to drive the Russians out of Germany.  Behind this theory lies the assumption that Russia is an aggressive military state, inspired by the same ideals as have led Germany to deluge the world with blood.  This is an assumption which is, I believe, absolutely unwarranted by anything in the history or character of the nation.