A Mighty People.

Press, Volume L, Issue 14898, 11 February 1914, Page 8

A Mighty People.

Some figures in onr cable news this morning show up the comparative insignificance of the population of the Dominions. The population of the Russian Empire, it is stated, has increased by 35,500,000 in twelve years. Tho population of the United Kingdom is only 45,000,000, while that of Australia, 4,500,000, is as a drop to a bucketful of water when compared with that of Russia. The growth of the Russian nation is very impressive. While in our new lands population grows slowly, the Rusisan Empire adds in a year between two and three millions to its numbere — more than twice as many as the entire population of New Zealand. In European Russia alone the births outnumber the deaths by about a million and three-quarters. This immense Empire, with a population of 167,000,000, and a birth-rate nearly twice that of England, must be one of the great factors in the world's peace and progress. It is a nation still in ite youth, only partly educated, living under an autocracy, and inhabiting a vast territory as yet developed to a very small extent, "The

Germans have reached their day," said a Russian writer years ago, ''the " French their afternoon, the Italians " their evening, the Spanish their "night; but the Slavs stand on the "threshold of the morning." Economically and strategically such a huge number of people under one rule must affect the future of our own Empire. A powerful and ever-expanding nation will seek still wider boundaries. Why, it will be asked, should two hundred millions of people bo without ice-free ports? The old Russian bogey, the invasion of India, has been temporarily laid by Russia'e check in the Far East and the Entente with. England, but national movements are more powerful than any understanding, and we have no right to assume that tho Russian Government regards as waste paper the plans for the invasion of India that lie in the pigeon-holes of the General Staff. In spite of the Entente, the army in India is distributed primarily to meet invasion from the north, and there is no likelihood of this system being altered.