at the present moment threatened in many parts with an Industrial Revolution, the ultimate effects of which may prove far more subversive than the attempted revolution of 1905.  For beneath her soil lie explosive materials more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by intelligentsia.  Her mineral wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and amazing in variety.  When her mines are opened up Russia will become, according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of The Russian Year-Book, “without a doubt the richest Empire the world has ever seen.”  Attracted by her vast mining possibilities, by her enormous virgin forests, by her practically unlimited capacity for grain-production, the capital of Europe is knocking at the doors of Russia.  Factories are rising, mines being started all over the country.  Russia is about to be exploited by European business enterprise, just as America and Africa have been.  The world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people as potential cheap labour.  Thus within the last few years something analogous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into existence in Russia.  We may catch a glimpse of what these new classes are like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called Changing Russia.  He writes: 

“The Russian bourgeois is of this sort; he wants to know the price of everything.  Of things which are independent of price he knows nothing, or, if he knows of them, he sneers at them and hates them.  Talk to him of religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of woman, and show that you understand anything about her unsexually; talk to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for money—­and the bourgeois is uneasy....  Instead of opera, the gramophone; instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature, the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of modern English life....  It may be thought that there is little harm in the commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not so bad as not to be on the way to something better.  But that would be a mistake; if once the Russian nation becomes thoroughly perverted, it will be the most treacherous, most vile, most dangerous in Europe.  For the perverted Russian all is possible; it is indeed his favourite maxim, borrowed, he thinks, from Nietzsche, that ‘all is permitted,’ and by ‘all’ he means all abomination, all fearful and unheard-of bestiality, all cruelty, all falsity, all debauch....  Selfish as it is possible to be, crass, heavy, ugly, unfaithful in marriage, unclean, impure, incapable apparently of understanding the good and the true in their neighbours and in life—­such is the Russian bourgeois.”

Mr. Graham’s picture of the new proletariat in the Ural mines is an equally horrible one: