“Behold the Cabinet of Rittich-Protopopov-Golitizin dragging into the court the Labor Group of the War Industries Committee, charged with aiming at the creation of a Russian Social-Democratic republic!  They did not even know that nobody aims at a ‘Social-Democratic’ republic.  One aiming at a republic labors for popular government.  But has the court anything to say about all these distinctions?  We know beforehand what sentences are to be imposed upon the prisoners....

“I have no desire to criticize the individual members of the Cabinet.  The greatest mistake of all is to seek traitors, German agents, separate Sturmers. We have a still greater enemy than the German influence, than the treachery and treason of individuals.  And that enemy is the system—­the system of a medieval form of government.”

How far the conspiracy of the government of Russia against the war of Russia and her Allies extended is shown by the revelations made in the Duma on March 3d by one of the members, A. Konovalov.  He reported that two days previously, March 1st, the only two members of the Labor Group of the War Industries Committee who were not in prison issued an appeal to the workers not to strike.  These two members of the Labor Group of the War Industries Committee, Anosovsky and Ostapenko, took their exhortation to the bureau of the War Industries Committee for its approval.  But, although approved by this great and important organization, the appeal was not passed by the government censor.  When Guchkov, president of the War Industries Committee, attempted to get the appeal printed in the newspapers he was prevented by action emanating from the office of Protopopov.

IV

Through all the early days of March there was labor unrest in Petrograd, as well as in some other cities.  Petrograd was, naturally, the storm center.  There were small strikes, but, fortunately, not much rioting.  The extreme radicals were agitating for the release of the imprisoned leaders of the Labor Group and urging drastic action by the workers.  Much of this agitation was sincere and honest, but no little of it was due to the provocative agents.  These, disguised as workmen, seized every opportunity to urge revolt.  Any pretext sufficed them; they stimulated the honest agitation to revolt as a protest against the imprisonment of the Labor Group, and the desperate threat that unless food was forthcoming revolution would be resorted to for sinister purposes.  And all the time the police and the troops were massed to crush the first rising.