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 take an effective part in the critical events of the following years, and notably disabled her from checking the progress of German and Austrian ascendancy in the Balkans.  Above all it increased the self-confidence of Germany, and inspired her rulers with the dangerous conviction that the opposing forces with which they would have to deal in the expected contest for the mastery of Europe could be more easily overthrown than they had anticipated.  To the Russian defeat must be mainly attributed the blustering insolence of German policy during the next ten years, and the boldness of the final challenge in 1914.

The third of the great empires was that of France, with 5,000,000 square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years, but having roots in the past.  It rested upon a home population of only 39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the most inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom.  As France had, a hundred years before, raised the standard of human rights among the European peoples, so she was now bringing law and justice and peace to the backward peoples of Africa and the East; and was finding in the pride of this achievement some consolation for the brtitality with which she had been hurled from the leadership of Europe.

The fourth of the great empires was America, with some 3,000,000 square miles of territory, and a vague claim of suzerainty over the vast area of Central and South America.  Her difficult task of welding into a nation masses of people of the most heterogeneous races had been made yet more difficult by the enormous flood of immigrants, mainly from the northern, eastern, and south-eastern parts of Europe, which had poured into her cities during the last generation:  they proved to be in many ways more difficult to digest than their predecessors, and they tended, in a dangerous way, to live apart and to organise themselves as separate communities.  The presence of these organised groups made it sometimes hard for America to maintain a quite clear and distinctive attitude in the discussions of the powers, most of which had, as it were, definite bodies of advocates among her citizens; and it was perhaps in part for this reason that she had tended to fall back again to that attitude of aloofness towards the affairs of the non-American world from which she seemed to have begun to depart in the later years of the last century.  Although she had herself taken a hand in the imperialist activities of the ’nineties, the general attitude of her citizens towards the imperial controversies of Europe was one of contempt or undiscriminating condemnation.  Her old tradition of isolation from the affairs of Europe was still very strong—­still the dominating factor in her policy.  She had not yet grasped (indeed, who, in any country, had?) the political