RUSSIA'S DEMOCRATS 



22' 



side of the acknowledged "advanced" 

 visionaries. 



The leaders of the movements of 1905 

 and the succeeding years were men whose 

 abilities and whose methods in no way 

 held the confidence either of the middle 

 classes or the peasants. 



In fact, what with the devotion of the 

 peasant to the "Little Father" as typify- 

 ing the supreme head of Church and 

 State, and his innate distrust of all 

 strangers, it had never been possible for 

 the revolutionists to get any wide sup- 

 port among the lower classes. In many 

 cases the transplanted peasants who made 

 up the industrial classes in the cities had 

 quite openly taken that side, but indus- 

 trialism as opposed to agriculture had 

 never enough votaries to make their sup- 

 port effective. 



The riots and general disturbances of 

 1905 were largely confined to the cities 

 and to workers on the various railways 

 who had been in sufficiently close touch 

 with urban life to make them quicker to 

 feel the need of change and progress. 



THE PRESENT LEADERS ARE FAR-SIGHTED 



The leaders of the new movement, 

 however, have learned their lesson. In- 

 stead of sporadic instances of terrorism, 

 followed by violence, they have entered 

 upon a campaign of education, carried 

 out systematically and with restraint, for 

 the purpose of having all the people with 

 them wdien the opportune time to strike 

 should come. 



They eagerly seized the opportunity of 

 the war and its consequent needs to illus- 

 trate in a practical way how much better 

 they could manage things if given the 

 power, and the Russian, who may be 

 slow, but who is not dull, has learned the 

 lesson so graphically put before him. 



It is, of course, too soon after the stir- 

 ring events of the last few weeks to esti- 

 mate with any degree of accuracy just 

 what result the overthrowing of abso- 

 lutism will have on the future of the 

 Russian people. The peasants — that is, 

 of course, the vast majority of the in- 

 habitants of the Empire — have, since the 

 emancipation, been singularly indifferent 

 to their government except in the way of 

 interest in the whole agrarian question. 



If the dynasty and the bureaucracy had 

 seen fit to give the peasants a satisfactory 

 solution of the problems arising from 

 land ownership, as they so easily could 

 have done, I doubt greatly if there would 

 have been any revolution at the present 

 time. 



Even a fairly good rule would have 

 satisfied these simple people. The lim- 

 ited amount of self-government they en- 

 joyed in the rural assemblies, hampered 

 though it was, was enough for the most 

 pressing questions of local interest. 



These assemblies, however, naturally 

 had no authority to dig down to the root 

 of the peasants' grievances — the unequal 

 distribution of land and the lack of any 

 just system for adjusting complaints 

 thereon — and could not on that account 

 be considered satisfactory. 



What undoubtedly had more effect 

 than anything else in influencing the peas- 

 ant favorably toward the new govern- 

 ment and against the old w r as the fact 

 that shortly after the beginning of the 

 present war it was seen that the regular 

 commissariat department of the War Of- 

 fice was quite unequal to carrying out the 

 tasks imposed by the mobilization of the 

 millions of men called to the colors in 

 Russia, namely, of provisioning, clothing, 

 and transporting the men according to 

 requirements. 



ASSOCIATIONS OE THE PEOPLE 



The first mobilization was carried out 

 in 1 914, in the summer-time, and did not 

 entail any great amount of physical hard- 

 ship on the recruits. When the winter 

 of that year had arrived, however, and 

 the cold had made transportation difficult, 

 the suffering was great. 



In many cases troops had to be sent 

 several weeks' journey by rail in unheated 

 freight cars, without any conveniences, 

 and if it had not been for the splendid 

 work of the zemstvo committees thou- 

 sands would have frozen and starved. 



Each local assembly, both in city and 

 country, formed special committees, as 

 they had done in the Japanese war, and, 

 working with that perfect spirit of co- 

 operation which distinguishes Russians 

 of every walk in life when interested in 

 any common object, they rapidly and 



