Those who exalt nationalist sentiments and pin their faith on imperialistic systems fail to realize that while the greatest push towards the War came from countries living under a less liberal regime, those very countries gave proof of the least power of resistance. Modern war means the full exploitation of all the human and economic resources of each belligerent country. The greater a nation's wealth the greater is the possibility to hold out, and the perfection of arms and weapons is in direct ratio with the degree of technical progress attained. Moreover, the combatants and the possibility of using them are in relation with the number of persons who possess sufficient skill and instruction to direct the war. Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, were able without any appreciable effort to improvise an enormous number of officers for the War, transforming professional men, engineers and technicians into officers. Russia, who did not have a real industrial bourgeoisie nor a sufficient development of the middle classes, was only able to furnish an enormous number of combatants, but an insufficient organization from a technical and military point of view, and a very limited number of officers. While on a peace footing her army was the most numerous in the world, over one million three hundred thousand men; when her officers began to fail Russia was unable to replace them so rapidly as the proportion of nine or ten times more than normal required by the War. Russia has always had a latent force of development; there is within her a _vis inertiae_ equivalent to a mysterious energy of expansion. Her birth-rate is higher than that of any other European country; she does not progress, she increases. Her weight acts as a menace to neighbouring countries, and as, by a mysterious historic law the primitive migrations of peoples and the ancient invasions mostly originated from the territories now occupied by Russia, the latter has succeeded in amalgamating widely different peoples and in creating unity where no affinity appeared possible. At any rate, although suffering from an excessively centralized government and a form of constitution which did not allow the development of popular energies nor a sufficient education of the people, Russia was perhaps, half a century before the War, the European country which, considering the difficulties in her path, had accomplished most progress. European Russia, with her yearly excess of from one million and a half to two million births over deaths, with the development of her industries and the formation of important commercial centres, progressed very rapidly and was about to become the pivot of European politics.