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 themselves in their turn by exploiting the population. The great industries had always had the patronage of the authorities before the war; during the war their profiteering was without check or limit. For these profiteers the people coined a vivid and true expression. They called them "the marauders of the rear," rightly considering them as being as morally degraded as the marauders of the battlefield, as the ghouls who plunder the wounded and dying.

The whole economy of State was conducted on lines of plunder. There was no system of State finance that could be so described. System had entirely gone out of the national finances, and the expression "State finance" had become an anachronism. To borrow money and to exploit the printing press—this was the sum total of the financial wisdom of the Tsardom. In two and a half years of war the State debt of Russia, which was the highest the world before the war, increased fourfold. Instead of a finance policy the Government flooded