shown to the Guards was the curse of the service. Any display of initiative by soldiers was punished, and the Press was afraid to speak; a discussion in a military paper of questions of dress even was considered to be harmful “free-thinking.” The result was that while we were outdistanced in _matériel_ by the armies of Europe, we made no progress in _moral_, despite our large numbers. Holding such views as, for instance, that the main use of a rifle was to make a pleasant noise in the “manual exercise,” we naturally did not worry about re-armament, and entered upon the war of 1854–56 armed with smooth-bore weapons against our opponents’ rifles. The spirit of our fleet, fresh from its victory at Sinope, and having such men in command as Lazareff, Nakhimoff, Korniloff, and Istomin, was excellent, and its numbers were strong; but, technically, it was even more behind the other fleets of Europe than our army was behind the land forces of our neighbours, and against our sailing-ships in the Black Sea the Allies brought a fleet of steam-vessels. The peace strength of the standing army in 1850–60 was more than 1,100,000 men, but the greater part of it was stationed in the western frontier districts, in the Caucasus, and in the large cities. The peace strength of the Allied armies amounted to: France, 400,000; Great Britain, 140,000; Turkey, 450,000. Only a portion of these forces took part in the war, but nevertheless Russia was beaten. As regards our preparedness in our first campaign on the Danube, an officer who took part writes in his recently published Memoirs:[14]