THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



349 



for whatever indifference has been shown 

 by this nation in the education and en- 

 lightenment of those whom they have in- 

 vited to these shores. 



If we are to have a nation that has but 

 one conception of national purpose, we 

 must have that conception in our own 

 souls in the first instance, and then we 

 must enlighten those who come here as 

 to what that conception is. The suppres- 

 sion of wrong-doing is the work of the 

 State after the act. Courts and jails are, 

 after all, but poor protections to a com- 

 munity. As a nation, we are looking for 

 curatives, when we should long since 

 have been looking for preventives. 

 Modern medicine is devoting itself now 

 not so much to the cure of ills as to 

 their prevention. Modern statesmanship 

 should follow the same course. 



The greatest disappointment of the 

 year has been the downfall of Russia. 

 And yet downfall is not the precise word 

 that should be used. The crumpling of 

 Russia is perhaps a better expression, for 

 I cannot believe that Russia is destroyed, 

 and that that great nation of a hundred 

 and eighty million people, with 7,000 

 miles of straightaway territory, can be 

 crushed out of existence by the iron heel 

 of the Kaiser, like some stray beetle. A 

 race that is so near to its beginning can- 

 not be so near to its end. There will be 

 another Russia some day — a wiser, a 

 more intelligent, a better educated, a 

 more intensely national Russia. 



The truth as we now see it is that 

 Russia was not a nation. She had been 

 long held together by the fear of the 

 enemy on her western border and by the 

 domination of a ruling class. 



RUSSIA UKE A CHILD REACHING FOR A 

 BUTTERFLY 



She had a love of freedom, but she 

 had no knowledge of what freedom is. 

 Her revolution, from the orderly over- 

 throw of the Czar to the anarchy of 

 Lenine, has been a simple and a natural 

 process, because what she wanted was 

 not the kind of independence, liberty, 

 and freedom of which we know and 

 which we cherish. It was not political 

 power that her people sought and 

 through which they might express them- 



selves. Within six months after their 

 revolution came they had degenerated 

 into a mob who believed that liberty 

 meant nothing less than the extreme of 

 individualism, without a common love 

 for anything excepting a desire to make 

 some material gain at the expense of 

 those who had land and lived in luxury. 



Russia was like a child that reached 

 out of the window after the butterfly, 

 and reached so far that it fell to the 

 ground and was crushed. She aban- 

 doned orderly processes within her own 

 country and abandoned her allies on the 

 outside. 



Because she was young, she did not 

 realize that it takes time and a common 

 purpose to make a nation, and she threw 

 her present chance of nationality away. 

 She resigned herself to the control of a 

 group who believed that there was but 

 one thing in the world worth struggling 

 for, and that was the establishment of a 

 new economic order, and this group un- 

 dertook to compel that order by methods 

 as ruthless as those that have filled Sibe- 

 rian prisons. Russia broke when her 

 constitutional convention was dissolved 

 by force. 



Russia's unprecedented sufferings 



Russia was broken because her people 

 did not know that political strength is a 

 condition precedent to economic or social 

 reform. 



Russia was sick of war, and it is no 

 wonder. She had called out twenty mil- 

 lion men. All of them did not go to the 

 front. Many of them could not be 

 armed. But she sent wave after wave 

 through Galicia and through Poland and 

 through East Prussia, until six million 

 Russians lay dead. Then her spirit 

 broke. The word went out that a new 

 day had dawned, a day in which justice 

 would be done — that the land was to be 

 free. The army resolved itself into its 

 individual units, turned its back upon the 

 front, and each individual went in search 

 of that piece of land which should be his 

 and which meant to him liberty. 



Now what is the meaning of this to 

 us? You say that Russia was the vic- 

 tim of German propaganda, and that, 

 through the hundreds of thousands of 



