opportunity, she might still hold in Russia the commanding position she has held for centuries in Portugal. I should like to allow myself a brief digression on the commercial importance of Siberia. One can only speak of it in superlatives. In the Government of Irkutsk alone, besides the forests, fisheries, and agricultural produce, there are coal, iron, molybdenite, copper, lead, silver, gold, immense beds of salt, marble, naphtha. The Americans and Japanese know all about these things, but very few English do. Our most common English book of reference contains these sentences: “In Siberia, Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Ekaterinburg have each about 50,000 inhabitants. Nijni-Novgorod, though small, is a station on the trans-Siberian railway” (“Whitaker’s Almanack”). The fact is that Tomsk, Omsk, and Irkutsk have well over 100,000 inhabitants, Vladivostok over 90,000, Novonikolaievsk, Chita, Blagoviestchensk well over 50,000. Nijni-Novgorod is not on the trans-Siberian railway at all, but is the terminus of a short branch-line. Ekaterinburg is in European Russia. If our chief English book of reference is so hopelessly inaccurate and inadequate, no wonder that English merchants have failed to realize the importance of Siberia. [SN: BOLSHEVIK AGITATION] For a brief space, then, England held a commanding position in the future granary, mine, and workshop of the world. She was ousted from it by the joint German and Bolshevik propaganda. Unscrupulous propaganda is the chief and practically the only weapon of Bolshevism, and through it they mean to conquer the whole civilized world. They do not rely so much on newspapers as on rumours. These are whispered from ear to ear, half in secret, their origin is not always apparent, and so they gain an authority which nothing in print could ever hope for. When Brusiloff made his effort in 1917, the Bolsheviks spread the report that he was a bad general, and that it was a great strategical error to advance as he did, he ought to have gone and retaken Warsaw. This criticism was heard all over the town, and when the news of his failure came through, everybody was ready with his “I told you so.”