English “hypocrisy.”  This, as has been well said, is a kind of “social cement,” for it is a tribute to a standard of social conduct set up by the dominant class in a nation.  And since there exists no dominant class in Russia, but only a dominant hierarchy drawn from all classes, hypocrisy is absent from the Russian character.  Mr. Stephen Graham, who was, I believe, at one time a clerk in a London office, found our civilisation so intolerable that one day he flung it off and escaped to Russia, where he has lived as a peasant tramp for many years.  To revolutionaries who met him and expressed their astonishment that an Englishman should choose Russia of all places to live in, he replied, “I came to Russia because it is the only free country left in the world.”  There is, in truth, much to be said for this startling remark.  In no country on earth is there such unaffected good-will, such open hospitality, such an instinctive respect for personal liberty—­liberty of thought and of manners—­such tolerance for the frailties of human nature, such an abundance of what the great Russian novelist Dostoieffsky called “all-humanness” and St. Paul called “charity,” as in Russia.  All this, of course, did not come about as a result of the bureaucratic system; it springs like that system itself from the fundamentally democratic spirit of the Russian people.

Sec.2. Religion.—­The last paragraph will read strangely to those people whose only ideas about Russia are gleaned from newspaper accounts of the revolution of 1905.  We shall come back to the revolution and its significance later; but meanwhile we must notice another very striking fact about Russian life—­its all-pervading religious atmosphere.  Russia is a land of peasants.  In England and Wales 78 per cent of the population live in towns and the remaining 22 per cent in the country; in Russia something like 87 per cent live in the country as against 13 per cent in the towns.  These figures are enough to show where the real centre of gravity of the Russian nation lies.  The peasant, or moujik, is a primitive and generally an entirely illiterate person, but he possesses qualities which his more sophisticated brothers in the West may well envy and admire, a profound common-sense, a grand simplicity of life and outlook, and an unshakable faith in the unseen world.

The interior of Russia is almost wholly unknown in the West; until a few years back it was as much of a terra incognita as Central Africa.  But the revolution led English writers and journalists to explore it, and when the dust and smoke of that upheaval, which had obscured the truth from the eyes of Europe, passed away, an astonished world perceived the real Russia for the first time.  “Russia,” writes Mr. Stephen Graham, who has done more than any other man to bring the truth home to us, “is not a land of bomb-throwers, is not a land of intolerable tyranny and unhappiness, of a languishing and decayed