There is a characteristic story told by Mr. Maurice Baring about a certain revolutionary who one day arrived at a village to convert the inhabitants to socialism.  “He thought he would begin by disproving the existence of God, because if he proved that there was no God, it would naturally follow that there should be no Emperor and no policeman.  So he took a holy picture and said, ’There is no God, and I will prove it immediately.  I will spit upon this eikon and break it in pieces, and if there is a God He will send fire from heaven and kill me, and if there is no God nothing will happen to me at all.’  Then he took the eikon and spat upon it and broke it to bits, and he said to the peasants, ‘You see, God has not killed me.’  ‘No,’ said the peasants, ‘God has not killed you, but we will’; and they killed him.”

This story, whether true or not, is a parable, in which one may read the whole meaning of the failure of the Russian revolution.  It shows how an attack upon what they hold sacred may rouse to acts of fury a people who are admitted by all who know them to be the most tolerant, most tender-hearted, and most humane in Europe.  The notion that Russia is a humane country may sound strange in English ears.  Yet capital punishment, which is still part of our legal system, was abolished in Russia as long ago as 1753, except for cases of high treason.  From 1855 to 1876 only one man was executed in the whole of that vast empire; and from 1876 to 1903 only 114.  On the other hand between the years 1905 and 1908 the total of executions reached the appalling figure of 3629.  This is but to translate into criminal statistics the story just quoted; for the years 1905-8 were the years when martial law reigned in Russia, the years of revolution.  The Tsar, it is true, wore the black cap, and the hangman’s rope was manipulated by the bureaucracy, but the jury who brought in the verdict was a jury of 145 million peasants.

Such, in broad outline, is the history of the revolutionary movement which is still so greatly misunderstood in England.  It was not the uprising of an oppressed nation, which successful for a brief while was finally crushed by the brute force of reaction; it was a civil war between two sections of a small educated class, in which the sympathies of the nation after fluctuating for a time eventually came down heavily against the revolutionaries.  There is in truth every excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive.  All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the pogrom, and Siberia for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political liberty, and dying, the “Marseillaise” on their lips, with