ous schemes of conquest in Persia, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Only ten years ago the jingo policy brought humiliating disaster to the Russian arms. The Government quickly forgot the awful lesson, and soon returned to the evil of its ways. They were "strangling" Persia. They were preparing to annex Mongolia and part of Manchuria. There lay the danger in the immediate future. The pressing necessities of national defence, a crushing military expenditure, a false and obsolete political philosophy, the imperialism of the governing class and the spirtual despotism of the Orthodox Church, those were before the war the great obstacles in the way of the moral and intellectual enfranchisement of the Russian people.
VIII
We have every reason to hope that those obstacles will be finally removed on the conclusion of peace, and that the war will prove a war of liberation for the victorious Russian people as it will prove a war of liberation even for the vanquished Germans. For this war is pre-eminently not a dynastic war or a war of conquest, it is a national and a democratic war. And it is almost a law of Russian history that a
