from all tribute in money or men, but were not even required to make any contribution towards the upkeep of the fleet, upon which the safety of all depended; the second that every port and every market in this vast empire, so far as they were under the control of the central government, were thrown open as freely to the citizens of all other states as to its own.  Finally, in this empire there had never been any attempt to impose a uniformity of method or even of laws upon the infinitely various societies which it included:  it not merely permitted, it cultivated and admired, varieties of type, and to the maximum practicable degree believed in self-government.  Because these 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