All along the route the people most concerned in the political disagreement between Russia and Japan were the trading classes. They feared war, for war would interfere with commerce and might mean financial ruin to them. They, almost to a man, expressed themselves as opposed to the forward policy of Russia. The newer settlers professed to have little fear of the industrial competition of the yellow races; but the older settlers in eastern Siberia still cling to the earlier policy, which had for its object the ousting of Chinese, Koreans and Japanese from the territories more recently occupied by Russia. Few could comprehend the Anglo-Japanese alliance, and all accepted it as a purely political combination effected by England in order to thwart the plans of Russia in the Far East, and consequently evidence of the inborn hostility of the Briton to Russia. One merchant, an ardent admirer of Leo Tolstoy’s teaching, asked me how it was that the English people had such an inveterate hatred of Russians. I explained to him that there was no ill feeling existent against the Russian people, only against the policy of the Russian Government, and therefore against the Russian soldiers, who were the tools used in making the policy effectual. “Ah,” said he, “the soldiers? They are a different people.” In Russia, more than in any country, there is a detachment of the people from the army, and from the executive government it represents. People were anxious to explain that they disassociated themselves completely from everything the Government was doing by its executive officials, the servants of the Crown. The army officers believed war to be imminent; they knew of no way in which it could be averted with honour to Russia. They thought a winter campaign would be most advantageous to them, whilst declaring that a spring campaign was more probable. In Port Arthur every one expected war. If they knew it from no other event, the crowd of newspaper war correspondents from England and the United States must have indicated by their very presence in the port that an appeal to arms was foreseen abroad. Withal, the Russians pursued their fatuous policy, and even so late as the last week of January dispatched from Port Arthur a regiment of Cossacks and two regiments of infantry to the interior, thus strengthening the force threatening Korea.