labor except money which they will be unable to use to buy
dinners, because there will be no dinners to buy. That
supposititious case is a precise parallel to what has happened
in Russia. Russia produced practically no manufactured
goods (70 per cent. of her machinery she received from
abroad), but great quantities of food. The blockade isolated
her. By the blockade I do not mean merely the childish
stupidity committed by ourselves, but the blockade, steadily
increasing in strictness, which began in August, 1914,
and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our stupidity. The
war, even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade,
was so actually. The use of tonnage was perforce restricted
to the transport of the necessaries of war, and these were
narrowly defined as shells, guns and so on, things which do
not tend to improve a country economically, but rather the
reverse. The imports from Sweden through Finland were no
sort of make-weight for the loss of Poland and Germany.


The war meant that Russia's ordinary imports practically
ceased. It meant a strain on Russia, comparable to that
which would have been put on England if the German
submarine campaign had succeeded in putting an end to our
imports of food from the Americas. From the moment of
the Declaration of War, Russia was in the position of one
"holding out," of a city standing a siege without a water
supply, for her imports were so necessary to her economy
that they may justly be considered as essential irrigation.
There could be no question for her of improvement, of
strengthening. She was faced with the fact until the war