From Moscow to Port Arthur the distance is 5,300 miles, and, save for the sea journey via the Baltic, the North Sea, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, the Russians were dependent for the transport of their troops and stores to Manchuria on such very inadequate railways as they then controlled. Japan, on the other hand, was able to rely on her fleet and her considerably developed mercantile marine; and, as soon as she had paralysed the Russian fleet and established her own command of the sea--as she did within two days of the outbreak of hostilities--she could land her forces whenever she chose at almost any convenient point on the sea-board of the theatre of war. The situation recalled, somewhat, the still worse position in which Russia had found herself at the time of the Crimean War when, in the absence of any rail facilities at all, her troops had to march, and their supplies and munitions had to be conveyed, hundreds of miles over dreary steppes--"huge columns that had quitted the far north and east of the interior dwindling to a few broken-down Battalions before they came in sight of Sebastopol"--whereas the allies could send their troops all the way to the Crimea by sea. While there are many other causes which, rightly or wrongly, have been regarded as contributing to the defeat of Russia by Japan--included therein being personal shortcomings of the Russian officers; mistakes made by them in strategy and tactics; defects in the Russian military system, and the half-hearted interest of the Russian nation in the struggle--the really decisive factors in the situation were the transport deficiencies of the Siberian and Manchurian railways. The construction of a _Trans-Siberian Railway_ as a great strategic line stretching across Asia, facilitating the development of a vast territory, and, above all, calculated to foster the realisation of Russia's aims in the Far East, first came under discussion about the year 1860. It was made the subject of an exhaustive study by a Committee of Ministers in 1875, but it was not until 1891 that the first sod was turned. Military and political considerations being paramount, such energy was shown in the work of construction that by 1896 the western section had been carried through Irkutsk to Lake Baikal and from the eastern shores thereof to Strietensk, while the eastern section--known as the Usuri Railway--had been made through Russia's Maritime Province from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk. The original design was that the line should be constructed on Russian territory all the way to Vladivostok; but this meant that from Strietensk it would have to follow the great bend made to the north by the Amur, the southern boundary of Russia, and the Russian Government thought it desirable to secure a more direct route.