enthusiasm at the beginning of the war. Most of the officers who had been in command of it at the time had fallen on some battle field or other; the soldiers too had disappeared, and the young recruits who had taken their place had been reared in different ideas, and were ignorant of the old discipline which had inspired the former regiments whose original contingents had been slain. The army had become a national one from the Imperialist it had been before; it was composed of the same elements of discontented minds who before they had been called to the colours had freely discussed the conditions under which the war was being fought, and who had noticed better than it would have been possible for them to do at the front, the mistakes of those in command, the remorseless dilapidation of the Public Exchequer which was going on everywhere, together with all the faults and the carelessness that had brought about all the disasters which had fallen upon the nation. This army could no longer nurse, in regard to the Czar, the veneration and almost religious respect which had animated it in earlier days. It had perceived at last that he was not at the height of the duties and responsibilities which had devolved upon him, and as a natural consequence of the fall of the scales from its eyes it had sided against him, together with the Duma, from which it was hoping and expecting the salvation which its masters of the present hour were unable to procure for it. But whilst the whole of Russia was aware of this state of things, Nicholas II. alone refused to see it. He felt afraid of appearing as the weak man that he really was; he refused all the urgent entreaties which were addressed to him, to appeal to his people, and to appoint a popular and responsible Ministry, capable once he had called it to power of requiring from him the fulfilment of his former promises, which he had determined beforehand never to keep. He threw himself from right to left, and from left to right, in quest of councillors after his own heart, or rather after the heart of the Empress, because it was she who finally decided everything; and he changed his Ministers with a facility which was the more deplorable that those of the morrow did not differ from the ones whom he had dismissed the day before, until at last, thanks to his irresolution and to his obstinacy, he contrived to discredit, not only in Russia, but also abroad and among his Allies, the government of which he was the head, together with his own person and the great Imperial might which he personified. At last even the extreme conservative parties, who until then had been on his side, joined the ranks of his enemies, and this defection of theirs made the disaster an irremediable one, and the fatal catastrophe inevitable.