RUSSIA AND BRITAIN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXVII, Issue 7, 8 May 1915, Page 4

RUSSIA AND BRITAIN.

Nothing is more necessary to the future happiness of Europe than the "complete and lasting understanding

between the British and Russian peoples" tor which the King expressed his ardent desire in his letter to the recently formed Russia Society. Russia, says a writer in the ''Daily Express," is fighting for its soul, and the heroic courage of the'soldiers who advance often to die, and retreat always to advance again, is backed by the grim determination of a great nation to build a new and better life on the struggles and suffering of this

war. Russia, as Mrs Lowther the Speaker's wife, has well said, essentially stands for pity as Great Britain stands For liberty and France stands for reason. The brute force oT German militarism is equally the enemy of them all. and they can only nourish when it is destroyed. If Russia has much to learn from Great Britain and France, her people have much to teach us. pity for the unfortunate, tolerance, kindliness, and realisation of life's mystery. Unhappily the ignorant and the subsidised are busy endeavouring to fan misunderstanding and to misrepresent the character of the Russians ami their government. The Russia Society should be able to limit their power for evil. Russia is working out its own way, and if that way does not commend itself to Mr Ramsav MueDouahl and Mr Israel Zangwill. that, after all. does not really mallei- very much is iho conelusion arrived at

THE NEED OF THE HOUR. Mr T. P. O'Connor, speaking at a St. Patrick's Day gathering at Liverpool, said the world had heard the "frank language in which Lord Kitchener had described the great need of the hour. He might .sum up Lord Kitchener's speech in the popular language of a layman by saying that it was now a \ question of shells, shells, shells. The ultimate result of the war no sane man could doubt. The real question) was not the final issue of the war; J but the duration of the war. When) would it end; this summer, this autumn, in a year or in two years' time?, And having brought down the real question to that point, he reduced it! still further bv repeating that it was a question of shells, shells, shells—shells not in .six months' time, but' shells now. That, in its turn, meant that every factory in the country that could be transformed into an armament factory should be working full, time—twenty-four hours eveiy day. if possible. j