At first sight, therefore, there seems to be a great deal in favour of the theory, somewhat widely held at the moment, that to crush Germany and Austria will be to lay Europe at the feet of Russia, and that when Germany has been driven out of France and Belgium, the Allies in the West might have to patch up a peace with her in order to drive the Russians out of Germany. Behind this theory lies the assumption that Russia is an aggressive military state, inspired by the same ideals as have led Germany to deluge the world with blood. This is an assumption which is, I believe, absolutely unwarranted by anything in the history or character of the nation. Historically speaking, the Russian Empire is an extension of the old Roman Empire; it is the direct heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, as the mediaeval "Holy Roman Empire," founded by Charlemagne in A.D. 800, was the heir of the Western Roman Empire, which had its capital at Rome itself. But the Eastern Empire survived its Western twin by a thousand years; the Goths deposed the last Roman emperor in 476, the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. The Russian Empire, therefore, which did not begin its political development until after the fall of Constantinople, entered the field some six and a half centuries later than the mediaeval empire of Charlemagne, which was indeed already falling to pieces in the end of the fifteenth century. Thus Russia presents the strange spectacle of a mediaeval State existing in the twentieth century, and she is still in some particulars what Western Europe was in the Middle Ages. She has, however, attained a unity, a strength and a centralisation which the Holy Roman Empire never succeeded in acquiring. There is nothing corresponding to the feudal system, with all the disruptive tendencies which that system carried with it, in modern Russia; partly owing to the constant danger of Mongolian invasion which threatened Russia for so many centuries, partly as a result of Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the _boyars_, who were analogous to the mediaeval barons, and of Peter the Great's substitution of a nobility of service for that of rank, Russia is politically more centralised than any mediaeval, and socially more democratic than any modern, country. Russia has also solved that other great problem which perpetually agitated the mediaeval world--the conflict between the secular and the spiritual power. She is the most religious nation in the world, but she has no Papacy; Peter the Great subordinated the Church to the State by placing the Holy Synod, which controls the former, under the authority of a layman, a minister appointed by the Tsar. Yet, while she appears united and centralised when we think of her nebulous prototype, the Holy Roman Empire, we have only to compare her with her Western neighbours, and especially with that triumph of State-organisation, Germany, to see how amorphous, how inefficient, how loose, how mediaeval is