can afford the time and get a permit, because in the country there is enough to eat.  They go to stay with relations—­most people in Moscow, in all classes, but especially among manual workers, have relations in the country.  One cannot, of course, go to an hotel as one would in other countries.  Hotels have been taken over by the State, and the rooms in them (when they are still used) are allocated by the police to people whose business is recognized as important by the authorities.  Casual travel is therefore impossible even on a holiday.

Journeys have vexations in addition to the slowness and overcrowding of the trains.  Police search the travellers for evidences of “speculation,” especially for food.  The police play, altogether, a much greater part in daily life than they do in other countries—­much greater than they did, for example, in Prussia twenty-five years ago, when there was a vigorous campaign against Socialism.  Everybody breaks the law almost daily, and no one knows which among his acquaintances is a spy of the Extraordinary Commission.  Even in the prisons, among prisoners, there are spies, who are allowed certain privileges but not their liberty.

Newspapers are not taken in, except by very few people, but they are stuck up in public places, where passers-by occasionally glance at them.[5] There is very little to read; owing to paper shortage, books are rare, and money to buy them is still rarer.  One does not see people reading, as one does here in the Underground for example.  There is practically no social life, partly because of the food shortage, partly because, when anybody is arrested, the police are apt to arrest everybody whom they find in his company, or who comes to visit him.  And once arrested, a man or woman, however innocent, may remain for months in prison without trial.  While we were in Moscow, forty social revolutionaries and Anarchists were hunger-striking to enforce their demand to be tried and to be allowed visits.  I was told that on the eighth day of the strike the Government consented to try them, and that few could be proved guilty of any crime; but I had no means of verifying this.

Industrial conscription is, of course, rigidly enforced.  Every man and woman has to work, and slacking is severely punished, by prison or a penal settlement.  Strikes are illegal, though they sometimes occur.  By proclaiming itself the friend of the proletarian, the Government has been enabled to establish an iron discipline, beyond the wildest dreams of the most autocratic American magnate.  And by the same professions the Government has led Socialists from other countries to abstain from reporting unpleasant features in what they have seen.

The Tolstoyans, of whom I saw the leaders, are obliged by their creed to resist every form of conscription, though some have found ways of compromising.  The law concerning conscientious objectors to military service is practically the same as ours, and its working depends upon the temper of the tribunal before which a man comes.  Some conscientious objectors have been shot; on the other hand, some have obtained absolute exemption.