If this five days' desperate fighting scarcely affected the position of the two armies, it inflicted on the Russian armies the discouragement of another defeat at the hands of a numerically inferior force, and the moral effect of adding to this unbroken series of reverses is not easily computed. With troops less dogged and devoted than those of the Czar, demoralization would have set in long before. The anxieties of Kuropatkin were now aggravated, too, by circumstances which no generalship on his part could alleviate and remove. All through the autumn reinforcements had been pouring along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the carrying capacity of which had been stretched so wonderfully by Prince Khilkoff. But even the resources of engineering genius have their limits. They cannot contrive a pint pot in such a way that it will hold a quart; and the number of trains that can be run over a single line is fixed inexorably by circumstance. Kuropatkin's urgent and incessant demands for more and more reinforcements had been met in large measure, but only at the expense of the other traffic, including the carriage of military stores. The enormous supplies required to provision and maintain at war efficiency armies numbering half a million of men may be imagined, and for these supplies Kuropatkin had become increasingly dependent on the railway. The more reinforcements he received the more mouths he had to feed; and the longer the campaign endured the less reliance was to be placed on what a devastated and exhausted countryside could provide. During the earlier months of the war, some relief to the strain on the railway could be found by drawing supplies from Vladivostock, which in turn could be fed from over-seas; but no sooner had the destruction of the Port Arthur fleet been completed, than the inexorable Japanese established a strict blockade of Vladivostock, and cut off this last resource. While the wretched troops amid all the rigors of the Manchurian winter were in need of such ordinary necessities as proper clothing, fuel, and even food, vast accumulations of stores, more than sufficient to supply all their needs, were lying rotting on the sidings of the Siberian Railway, immovable because of the congestion of traffic on the already overburdened line. To add to the anxiety of the situation came the grave dislocation caused by the riots and strikes which broke out in all the great industrial and distributive centres of Russia after the fall of Port Arthur, and which revealed an internal crisis even more menacing than the military crisis which confronted the army in Manchuria. For weeks together, just at the moment that prompt and vigorous action was demanded, the whole administrative system of Russia was paralyzed, and the energies of its directors were absorbed in staving off domestic revolution instead of in organizing the measures for conducting a foreign war. On the other hand, the Japanese