the empire of the czars was also, by most people's reckonings, an automatic member of the select club of "world powers" in the coming twentieth century. Its sheer size, stretching from Finland to Vladivostok, ensured that---as did its gigantic and fast-growing population, which was nearly three times that of Germany and nearly four times that of Britain. For four centuries it had been expanding, westward, southward, eastward, and despite setbacks it showed no signs of want ing to stop. Its standing army had been the largest in Europe through out the nineteenth century, and it was still much bigger than anybody else's in the approach to the First World War, with 1.3 million front line troops and, it was claimed, up to 5 million reserves. Russia's military expenditures, too, were extremely high and with the"extraordinary" capital grants on top of the fast-rising"normal" expenditures may well have cqualed German's total. Railway construction was proceeding at enormous specd prior to 1914-threatening within a short time to undermine the German plan(i.c., the so-called Schlieffen Plan) to strike westward first-and money was also being poured into a new Russian fleet after the war with Japan. Even the Prussian General Staff claimcd to be alarmed at this expansion of Russian might, with the younger Moltke asserting that by 1916 and 1917 Prussia's enemies' military power would then be so great that he did not know how he could deal with it Some of the French observers, by contrast, looked forward with grcat glee to the day when the Russian steamroller" would roll westward and flatten Berlin. And a certain number of Britons, especially those connected with the St. Petersburg embassy, were urging their political chiefs that Russia is rapidly becoming so powerful that we must retain her friendship at almost any cost From Galicia to Persia to Peking. there was a widespread concern at the growth of Russian might