Russia ought to continue to show an upward trend for a considerable time to come, or in any case not fall below the fairly high level at which it stood in the years immediately preceding the war.
In Russia there are large resources of human energy, and we are now well aware that the existence of so large a quantity of energy stored in the form of human beings is not due to some inexorable law of nature, but is historically determined by definite psychological factors. But we economists also know that the quality of the constituents of a population is of enormous importance to its economic life. Further, there is such a thing in human beings as "economically essential quality," if I may be permitted to use the phrase.
If one were to believe certain representations of the Russian people which have recently been given currency in England, such economic qualities are entirely foreign to that people. In these representations the Russian people is depicted as a religious anarchist caring nothing for the things of this world, as an Eastern people of contemplators, with no aptitude for the "bourgeois" life and conduct of Western peoples. I must say that it is impossible in any way to agree with such hasty generalisations which ignore the actual facts alike of the past and of the present. The Russian people in its Great Russian branch—the most prominent, I think, both politically and culturally—possesses very decided economic gifts. Our late great historian, Klyuchevsky, showed—to my mind in very convincing fashion—that the Russian State was itself in considerable measure of commercial origin and bears an evident commercial stamp at the very beginning of
