484 



Tiiii Riivii'.w OF Reviews. 



passed entirely into the hands of its courageous editor. 

 Russia has always had an irresistible attraction for 

 Stead ; not so much for what he conceived it to be, as 

 for what he fancied it capable of becoming; It seemed 

 almost ^'irgin soil, fit to be turned into a sort of Eden. 

 And it was his ambition to help to make it that. 

 Hence he was ever on the look-out for tlie coming 

 Russian men, the born leaders, the rough hewers of 

 the nation's destinies. 'J'he Tsar, Pobcdonostseff, 

 General Ignatiel'f, Count Leo Tolstoy, Colonel Pashkoff, 

 Mr. Les.sar, and a host of others became first his 

 acquaintances, and then his admirers and friends. 

 And he sought to sway them, to inoculate their minds 

 with his ideas, to fire their ambition and direct it to 

 lofty ends. To admit that in his estimates of persons 

 and his conceptions of things Russian he went some- 

 times far astray is but another way of describing him 

 as human, impulsive and optimistic. But mistakes and 

 failures never discouraged him. They were always 

 discounted in advance; as he himself wrote me on 

 Christmas Eve, 1903, just before he brought out his 

 daily newspaper: " VVe are going forward in faith, 

 nothing doubting, believing that we shall be led into 

 the rigiit jiath, (ijh'r Ihe usual share oj blunders.'" The 

 tasks which he set himself in Russia, during and after 

 each of his visits to that country, were Herculean, 

 some of them indeed utterly impossible. And >et his 

 work was not wholly vain. He accomplished something 

 each time, and in every case it was an improvement — 



an improsement immeasurably smaller than he 

 intended, but still an improvement. 



Although Mr. Stead's estimate of the people he met 

 was as optimistic as were his forecasts of events, and 

 therefore in need of correction, his method of dealing 

 with men whose co-operation he needed was eminently 

 practical and generally successful. He raised them in 

 their own opinion to a much higher plane than that 

 on which they had lived and worked, made them fancy 

 that they wielded enormous power or influence over 

 their fellows, had received a mission from on high to 

 use it for the good of others, and filled them with 

 confidence in the upshot of their endeavours. Over and 

 over again I have seen him apply this method to men 

 of little or no account in high places, whose active help 

 or benevolent neutrality was indispensable to the 

 success of one or other of his grandiose schemes. 

 And human nature being what it is, he often had his 

 way and gained his point. I was intensely amjsed at 

 the first Hague Conference to see him approach fifth- 

 rate delegates, inspire them with unbounded faith in 

 themselves, and induce them to come forward with 

 some reform proposal of his own which they imagined 

 they had themselves put together. It was in this spirit, 

 I fancy, that Mr. Stead approached the present .Sultan 

 of Turkey, whom he induced to throw himself in the 

 Holy War against War and promise a subscription 

 towards the expenses of the projected delegation which 

 was to visit the capitals of Europe. 



^.f^^'^id^l .\\) 





^^.•^^•CwX.^ 



"In For It." 



.\Iasii;k I1i.kiii.rt: " \V.-»kc up, guv'nor ! //<'j come back. Vou'U got it iirescnlly." 



(Another cirionii wliitli illiistr.-itcs llir iriflucnci; of Ihe I'.M.G. nt this period. The cartoon is interesting because of it^ 

 portraits of the (I.IL.M., .Mr. Herbert (now Lord) Gladstone, and Randolph Churchill, who then was the life and soul of 

 the " Fourth Parly.") 



