“Gold mining is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man are made viler.  If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields.  A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia.  It was a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauchery....  The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand pounds, it is rather difficult to know how to spend it.  His ideal of happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him lies in that....  Mias is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand inhabitants.  It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone.  It is situated in a most lovely hollow among the hills, and, seen from the distance, it is one of the most beautiful villages of North Russia; but seen from within, it is a veritable inferno.”

Mr. Graham writes as a poet rather than as an economist or a sociologist, but there is no doubt a grave danger to Russia in a sudden adoption of industrial life.

Intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariate are all products of the same forces, all belong to the same family; they are westernised Russians; they have passed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century at one stride, and the violent transition has cut them completely adrift from tradition and from all moral and religious standards; books, commerce, and industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilisation, have not civilised such Russians, they have de-civilised them.  But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fraction of the nation; and there are happily signs that the dangers of an exotic culture are being realised even by the intelligentsia themselves.  Since the failure of the revolution there has been a remarkable revival of interest among Russian thinkers in the native institutions, habits, and even the religion of the country; and it may be that in time there will emerge from this chaos of ideals a culture and a civilisation which will “make the best of both worlds” by adopting Western methods without surrendering an inch of the nation’s spiritual territory, above which floats the standard of religion, simplicity, and brotherly love.  The present war, terrible as it is, may do something towards bringing this about, for the Russian people, faced by a common danger and united in a common purpose, are now of one mind and one heart, in a way that they have not been since a century ago Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Moscow.