It is necessary to get an idea of what has occurred in Russia during the last ten years in order to understand her present situation and perspectives. The Russian people were neither prepared nor desirous of fighting against Japan for the Yalou forests, a problem that interested only a group of greedy capitalists. Nicolas was egged on by the Kaiser, who was more than anxious to involve his neighbor in a mess in the Far East, and thus to divert his attention from the Near East where the interests of the Triple Alliance demanded the elimination, or at least the weakening, of the formidable ally of France. The Czar caught the bait, and was rewarded with the Treaty of Portsmouth, which put an end to Russia’s ambitions in Manchuria and crippled her international prestige, to the immediate advantage of Germany and Austria. The defeated bear was forcibly driven to introspection. Her navy almost totally destroyed, her army decimated and demoralized, her population torn by revolutions and civil warfare, Russia faced a Herculean task. The government was confronted with a double problem, to quench the internal conflagration, and to get ready for “retaliation.” The first aim was more or less achieved; the revolutionists were hanged, shot, imprisoned, exiled; the moderate elements and the European financiers, who demanded a guarantee for their enormous loans, were hood-winked by a semblance of parliamentarism, the butaforial Duma, an institution elected and managed practically by the Czar’s ministers. With feverish energy the government set out to carry through its second purpose. The Dumas were forced to sanction gigantic war-budgets, and the entire bureaucratic state was thrown into a crucible of radical, sweeping reforms. The reconstruction of the army has become the all-important issue. Without naming the potential enemy, all parties, except the Socialists, agreed that Russia must concentrate her forces on the building up in the fastest possible time of an enormous, efficient, _modern_ army. The majority of the people differed with the government, however, on one point, as to who should carry out the great task. The people have had little confidence in the capability of the bureaucracy for self-reformation; they have applied to them the Russian saying, “Only the grave can change the hunchback.” Alexander Guchkov, while president of the Duma and later as an influential private citizen, has revealed the hopelessly rotten state of affairs in the military and civil organization of the country, managed by unscrupulous thieves and grafters, by useless sinecure-holders from among the nobility and the royal family. The reorganization of the state, pointed out Mr. Guchkov and his followers, must be taken from the hands of the effeminate and imbecile Grand Dukes, and entrusted to representatives of the nation. For such a heresy Guchkov had to resign from his post as head of the “parliament,” and the work of reconstruction continued to be handled by