Russia's Financial Position.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 422, 26 May 1904, Page 5

Russia's Financial Position.

Russia's position is like that of a nobleman who has a large and neglected estate and a house that is falling about his ears, who is deeply in debt, who pays one lender by borrowing from another, who sees his debts steadily mounting up towards the point at which ruin btcomeß unavoidable, and who desperately makes the most fantastic attempts at making money, hoping to disentangle himself. One of Russia's strange expedients for getting money was lately revealed in The Times. According to its extremely well-informed Pekin correspondent, Russia claimed after the Boxer rising in Ohina an indemnity of £17,900,000, on the ground that she had kept 179,000 soldiers in China, at an expense of £IOO each. According to the Pekin correspondent of The Times she kept in reality only 50,000 in China, and the Russian exchequer should thus have made- a net profit of at least £12,900,000 out of this transaction.

Of late years the supply of loanable money has, tor various reasons, become scarce and dear in the various money centres in the world, and it would have been extremely difficult for Russia to provide for her ordinary peace expenditure as she would not easily have been able to obtain these loans, without which she can apparently not make both ends meet. Therefore it is not easy to see how Russia will be able to raise the funds necessary for carrying on the Japanese war, which will probably prove exceedingly costly, and how she will meet her current obligations, unless she should abandon, her overambitious policy,, which is beyond her financial strength, and disband her army and navy. However, such 4 an event seems hardly likely. Many of the best observers have for a long time past been of opinion that Russia is financially unable to conduct a great war, % However, lack-of money has never prevented a nation from going to war, for it may make up for its war expenses by repudiatinglts public debt. Whether Russia will meet her obligations in full remains to be seen. If she should be forced to repudiate or to compound with her foreign creditors, either because of the costliness of the present war, or because the international money market can no longer supply Russia's insatiable financial requirements, it will bean evil day for tbe French nation, which has lent Russia more than £300,000,000.

Russia's financial collapse would probably mean the break up of the Dual Alliance, for in the first place the thrifty Frenchman is exceedingly sensitive when his pocket is touched, and in the second place Russia would have proved herself financially unable to be an efficient ally to France in case of war. Ample funds are, after all, sin-'' ews of war which are indispensible as '.rre armies and fleets.-*-© Eluzbaehw, in trie Nineteenth Century,