Inside the Russian Revolution

But not a hand was lifted to take Elisabeta Feodorovna. What Kerensky could not have done, what no police force in Russia could have done with those men that day, her perfect courage and humility did. It cowed and conquered hostility, it dispersed the mob. That great crowd of liberty-drunk, blood-mad men went quietly home, leaving a guard to protect the convent. It is probably the only spot in Russia to-day where absolute inviolability may be said to exist for any members of the hated “bourju,” as the Bolsheviki call the intellectual classes.

On the August day when I rang the bell of the convent’s massive brown gate I did not really know that I was to see and speak with the grand duchess. Mr. William L. Cazalet, of Moscow, the friend who took me there, doubted very much whether I could be received thus informally, without a previous appointment. The gravity of the times, and especially the situation of the Romanoff family, placed the Grand Duchess Serge in a position of extreme delicacy, and Mr. Cazalet said frankly that he expected to find her living in strict retirement. The best he could promise, he said, was that I should see the convent, where one of his young cousins was a nun.

The convent, which is situated in the heart of Moscow, is a group of white stone and stucco houses built around an old garden and surrounded by a high white wall, over which vines and foliage ramble and fall. A key turned, the brown gate swung open to our ring and we stepped into a garden running over with the richest bloom. I remember the pink and white sweet-peas against the wall, the white madonna lilies that nodded below and the carpet of gay verbenas that ran along the pathway to the convent door. There were many old apple trees and a forest of lilacs, purple and white.

In her small room, combination of office and living room, we were received by the executive head of the convent, Mme. Gardeeve, for many years the intimate friend of Elisabeta Feodorovna. Like the grand duchess she had had a life full of tears and tribulation, in spite of her rank and wealth, and when the grand duchess took the veil she followed her example and became a nun. The business of the convent is transacted under her direction, and most ably, I was told. Efficiency and ability are written in every feature of Mme. Gardeeve’s fine face, in her crisp, clear voice and quick though graceful movements. Her enunciation was a joy to hear, an especial joy to me, for I have difficulty in understanding the rather indistinct French spoken by the average Russian. Mme. Gardeeve’s French was of that perfect kind you hear spoken in Tours more often than in Paris or elsewhere. I understood every word. Woman of the world to her finger tips, Mme. Gardeeve wore the picturesque habit of the order with the same grace that she would have worn the latest creation of the ateliers. She smiled and chatted with Mr. Cazalet, who is very well known in the convent, and was most kind and cordial to me. After a few minutes’ conversation my friend said to her that I had told him some extremely interesting things about public schools in America, and he wanted me to repeat them to her.

So I told her something about the extraordinary experiments that have been worked out in Gary, Indiana, and the work that was being done in New York and elsewhere to give children, rich and poor alike, the complete education they merit. As I talked she exclaimed from time to time: “But it is excellent! I find it admirable! The Grand Duchess should hear of this!”

I said hopefully that I would like very much to meet the Grand Duchess and she replied she thought it might be arranged. Not to-day, however, as the Grand Duchess’s time was completely filled. How long did I expect to remain in Moscow? A week? It could certainly be arranged, she thought. Meanwhile what would I like to see of the convent? Everything? She laughed and touched a little bell on the desk beside her. A little nun appeared and Mme. Gardeeve handed me over to her with orders that I was to see everything.

I saw a small but perfectly equipped hospital, with an operating room complete in all its details. The hospital had been devoted to poor women and children before the war. Now most of the wards are filled with wounded soldiers. I saw a room filled with blinded soldiers who were being taught to read Braille type by sweet-faced nuns. Blindness is bitter hard for any man, but for illiterates it must be blank despair. I saw a house full of refugee nuns from the invaded districts of Poland. I saw an orphanage full of slain soldiers’ children. I lingered long in the lovely garden where nuns were at work, some with their habits tucked up, among the potato rows, some pruning trees and hedges, some sweeping the gravel paths with besoms made of twigs, some teaching the orphan girls to embroider at big frames, to knit and to sew. They made a fascinating picture, and I could hardly leave them even to see the church, which is one of the most beautiful small gems of architecture to be found in Europe. I never really saw that church at all, as it turned out, for just as we entered and I was getting a first impression of its blue and white and gold beauty, a messenger hastily opened the door and said that the Grand Duchess wanted to see me.

We went back to the convent and I was taken to a tiny parlor, which is the private retreat of the Lady Abbess. It is not much bigger than a hall bedroom, and it gave the same general impression of blue and white and gold that one sees throughout the place. There were many books bound in the lapis blue which seems to be the Grand Duchess’s favorite color; a few pictures, mostly of the Madonna and Child; some small tables, one with Stephen Graham’s book, “The House of Mary and Martha,” held open upon it by a piece of embroidery carelessly dropped. There were easy chairs of English willow with blue cushions, and a businesslike little desk crammed with papers. Everywhere, in the window, on tables and the desk, were bowls and vases of flowers. Every room in the place, in fact, was filled with flowers.

The door opened and the Grand Duchess came in with a radiant smile of welcome and a white hand outstretched. “I am so glad to find that I had time to meet you to-day, Mrs. Dorr,” she said, in a rarely sweet voice.

“Your highness speaks English?” I exclaimed in surprise, and she replied, waving me to a comfortable armchair: “Why not? My mother was English.”

I had forgotten for the moment that the Grand Duchess and her younger sister, the former Empress of Russia, were daughters of the Princess Alice of England and granddaughters of Queen Victoria. Russia seemed to have forgotten it also and to have remembered only that the father of these women was the Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine. The Grand Duchess added when we were seated that when she was a child at home they always spoke English to their mother, if German to their father. “I welcome an opportunity to speak English, because if one is wholly Russian, as I am, and especially if one is orthodox, he hears little except Russian or French.” Then she said, with another radiant smile: “Tell me what you think of my convent.”

I told her that I felt as though I had stepped back into the glowing and romantic thirteenth century.

“That is just what I wanted my convent to be,” she replied, “one of those busy, useful medieval types. Such convents were wonderfully efficient aids to civilization in the middle ages, and I don’t think they should have been allowed to disappear. Russia needs them, certainly, the kind of convent that fills the place between the austere, enclosed orders and the life of the outside world. We read the newspapers here, we keep track of events and we receive and consult with people in active life. We are Marys, but we are Marthas as well.”

The Grand Duchess’s interest in the outside world is patent. She asked me eagerly to tell her how things were going in Petrograd, and her face saddened when I told her of the riotous and bloody events I had witnessed during the days of the July revolution, scarcely past. “Times are very bad with us just now,” she said, “but they will improve soon, I am sure. The Russian people are good and kind at heart, but they are mostly children—big, ignorant, impulsive children. If they can find good leaders, and if they will only realize that they must obey their leaders, they will emerge from this dreadful chaos and build up a strong, new Russia. Have you seen Kerensky, and what do you think of him?”

I replied rather cautiously. Like every one else, I still hoped that Kerensky would succeed in getting his released giant back into its bottle, and I did not want to unsettle any one’s confidence in him even to the extent of an expressed doubt. Kerensky, I told her, was greatly admired and liked, and I hoped he might prove the strong leader Russia needed in her trouble.

“I hope so,” replied the last of the Romanoffs, “I pray for him every day.”

The bells of the little church chimed the hour softly, and the Grand Duchess paused to cross herself devoutly. “I want to hear about those wonderful public schools of yours,” she said, “but first tell me what America is doing in war preparation.”

As I talked she listened, nodding and smiling as if immensely pleased. The great airplane fleet in course of construction seemed to amaze and delight her, and when I told her of the conservation of the food supply and the restriction of the manufacture of alcohol she fairly glowed. “America is simply stupendous,” she exclaimed. “How I regret that I never went there. Of course I never shall now. To me the United States stands for order and efficiency of the best kind. The kind of order only a free people can create. The kind I pray may be built some day here in Russia.” And then she made her one allusion to the deposed Czar. I did not know that at that minute the Czar was on his way to Siberia, but it is very probable that she knew it. She said: “I am glad you are going to protect your soldiers from the danger of the drink evil. Nobody can possibly know how much good the abolition of vodka did our soldiers and all our people. I think history should give the Emperor credit for his share in that act, don’t you?” I agreed that the Emperor should receive full credit for what he did, and I spoke with all sincerity.

Elisabeta Feodorovna kept me for nearly three-quarters of an hour talking to her about the Gary schools, which she is eager to see in Russia; about American women and their part in the war, and about welfare work for children, especially for tubercular and anemic children. “It is wonderful,” she said with a sigh. “I can scarcely help envying you sinfully. Think of a great, young, hurrying nation that can still find time to study all these frightful problems of poverty and disease, and to grapple with them. I hope you will go on doing that, and still find more and more ways of bringing beauty into the lives of the workers. How can you expect workmen who toil all day in hot, hideous factories or on remote farms, with nothing in their lives but work and worry, to have beauty in their souls?”

She wanted eagerly to know about the women soldiers, and said that she greatly admired their heroism. What was their life in camp like, and were they strong enough to stand the hardships? The Grand Duchess Serge is a good feminist and she agreed with me that in Russia’s crisis, as in the situation in all countries created by the war, it had been completely demonstrated that women would have henceforth to play a rôle equally important and equally prominent as that of men.

They would have to share equally with men in the successful operation of the war whether on the battlefield or behind the lines. She had always had a special devotion to Jeanne d’Arc and believed her to have been inspired by God. Other women also had been called of God to do great things.

“I am glad you like my convent,” she repeated as we parted. “Please come again. You know that it does not belong to me any more, but to the Provisional Government, but I hope they will let me keep it.”

I hope they will. The House of Mary and Martha, with the beautiful woman in it, is one of the things new Russia can least afford to lose.

CHAPTER XVI THE TAVARISHI FACE FAMINE

The Romanoffs gone, the soviets apparently yielding to Kerensky’s demand for a coalition government, and finally voting to give him almost supreme power, what then stood in the way of restoring order in the army and civil life? Readers of the despatches in the daily press last September and later must have puzzled over this question. The fact is that while there were indications that the last convention held in Petrograd by the Russian Socialists, the so-called Democratic Council, ended in a partial victory for Kerensky, there remained every evidence that the Bolshevik element was still very strong. Kerensky succeeded in forming a coalition ministry, but the Petrograd Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates at the same time succeeded in electing a Bolshevik central executive committee with the notorious Leo Trotzky as chairman, displacing N. C. Tcheidse, the Georgian Duma member, prominent in the Council, but against whose sincerity and honesty I never heard a word.

Trotzky was elected because the Bolsheviki couldn’t then get Lenine back. There were not enough bold spirits in the Democratic Council to force from the government a promise of immunity from arrest for Lenine, should he appear at a meeting, so he was kept in the background and Trotsky was made chairman of the Petrograd executive committee in his stead.

Lenine is the real leader of the Bolsheviki to-day, exactly as he was during the fateful days of July when he sent mutinous soldiers and idle workmen out on the streets of the capital with machine guns to murder the populace. Trotzky, however, is an able and faithful lieutenant. He is a Jew and his real name is Braunstein. He is one of those Jews, unhappily too prominent in Russian affairs just now, who are doing everything in their power to prejudice the people of Russia against the race, and to check the movement for the full freedom of the Jews of the empire.

Trotzky, or Braunstein, is known to many in New York city. He gained some newspaper publicity when he arrived in New York from Spain a short time before the February revolution. He posed as a martyr to socialist principles, one who had been persecuted by the governments of four countries—Russia, Germany, France and Spain. All four had expelled him, he said, for the crime of editing really successful socialist newspapers. Trotzky’s story was founded on fact. At least, four countries did find him as a citizen too undesirable to retain. Banishment from Russia, under the old régime, is no stigma, so we may begin Trotzky’s saga in August, 1914, the early days of the world war. He was editing a Jewish paper in Berlin. He was given a few hours to leave, he says, and with his family fled across the Swiss frontier to Zurich. From there he went to Paris, where he was miraculously able, poor as he had always been and high as the price of white paper was soaring, to establish a socialist newspaper in the Russian language. When the Russian contingent of the allied armies reached France in April, 1916, Our Words, which was the name of Trotzky’s spicy little sheet, was circulated free among the 65,000 soldiers. The motto of the paper was “Down with the War” far more than it was “Up with Socialism.” It was filled from page one to page four with the sort of pro-German stuff that has done its deadly work with the men at the Russian front, inducing them to refuse to fight and thus opening their country to the German army.

The French government, which had its hands full with its own pet sedition raisers, had never before heard of Trotzky, but now it told him to move on. He did. He went to Spain, where he was arrested as an extreme trouble-maker, and after a short time expelled from the country. He came to the United States, where he remained until the Russian revolution of late February, 1917, when he flew back to Petrograd. Trotzky always had money to make these long journeys. At Halifax he was halted, for the English government knew his record. The English authorities considered interning him for the duration of the war, but a lot of people interceded for the poor Russian exile, and he was allowed to go on to Russia. Poor Russia!

Trotzky was elected a member of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates, being a pacifist and never having done any manual work. Last summer when I was in Russia I used to read almost daily in the accounts of the National Council of Soviets, or councils, burning speeches of Trotzky’s in which he urged a separate peace with Germany, or what would amount to exactly the same thing, Russia’s immediate cessation of fighting. Trotzky ridiculed the idea that abandonment of the allies would in any way injure Russia in a material way or soil the national honor. His ideas of economics and finance were simply and frequently reiterated. Arrest all capitalists and force them to disclose the secret of how they got rich, and hang all the bankers—presumably as the first step toward seizing the contents of the banks. With this man as chairman of the central executive committee of the Petrograd Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council, and with the October revolt of the German naval men on five ships for him to point to as evidence that the social revolution is at hand in Germany, the life of the last coalition government was not likely to be peaceful.

But the end of the Bolsheviki is in sight in spite of Lenine, Trotzky and the entire majority in the Council of Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Delegates. It has been coming on stealthy feet for many months, and now the messengers’ hands are on the latch. The messengers’ names are Hunger and Cold.

When I went down to my first dinner in Petrograd last May, I was amazed to see the price on the menu card placed at five rubles fifty kopecks, about $1.80. In a previous visit to Petrograd I had eaten an excellent dinner in this same hotel and had paid for it one ruble seventy-five kopecks, or about seventy-five cents, as the ruble was then valued. The one offered for more than twice this amount consisted of a watery soup, a small piece of not very fresh fish, a thin slice of veal with peas and a water ice flavored with cherry juice. One piece of black bread without butter was served. If I wanted water to drink with the meal I had to pay two rubles for bottled water, for one drink of plain water in Petrograd is an attempt at suicide by the typhoid route. If I wanted coffee I had to pay one ruble sixty-five kopecks more, and after I added the customary 10 per cent. for the tip my check was ten rubles and six kopecks. Three dollars and thirty-five cents.

This was bad enough, but before I left Russia the price of that meager meal had advanced to thirteen rubles and the quality of the dinner had sensibly declined. Also the tip had advanced, for after a strike of waiters a system was adopted all over Russia, as far as I traveled, whereby tips were abolished and 15 per cent. was added to the bill by the hotel and restaurant proprietors.

You now pay an additional 15 per cent. of your entire hotel bill in Russia, which is distributed in tips to all the servants except the lift boys and the gorgeous individual who stands in front of the hotel door, who assists you to alight from your droshky when you arrive, and touches his peacock feather trimmed hat to you when you go in and out. He is called the Swiss, denoting the origin of his earliest predecessor, I imagine, and why he and the elevator men do not share in the general distribution I never found out.

Walk down the Nevsky Prospect, or the Grand Morskaia, which begins in fine shops and ends in palaces, like Fifth avenue. Wander through the maze of little shops in the huge arcade called the Gostinny Dvor. Go far out on the Nevsky, cross the beautiful Anitchkoff bridge, with its four groups of rearing horses, and turn in at the Litainy, where the cheaper shops are to be found, and try to buy something. It doesn’t matter what, just try to buy something to eat, drink, wear or use. When the waiter brought in the coffee that morning he said cheerfully, “Niet malako,” no milk. Try to buy a few cans of condensed milk against a similar experience. I walked all over Petrograd trying to buy condensed milk, for the shortage of fresh milk was grave when I arrived, and grew steadily worse. I found one can, for which I paid two dollars. Shortly afterward a friend arrived from Japan and gave me two cans, which she spared out of her store.

Russian illiteracy is so general that the shop signs are not written but illustrated. Brilliant signboards on the outside show pictures of what the shopkeeper has to sell. A dairy shop will have a picture of a cow, crocks of butter, chickens, ducks, geese, baskets of eggs, cheese of many varieties and so forth. A greengrocer’s signboard is decorated like a seed catalogue cover, while a clothing store is advertised by pictures of clothes and hats which were fashionable perhaps ten years ago. It once added to the gay appearance of the streets, but just now it increases their anxious and ominous air. Hundreds of the shops are empty, the doors are locked and the brilliant signboards alone remain to indicate that business was ever conducted there. One of the mournfulest sights in Petrograd to me was an abandoned shop where they once sold French bread and pastry. I used to turn my head away from the mocking poster, picturing crisp white bread in yard-long loaves, delicious breakfast crescents, patés and cakes. The standard bread served in Russia at the present time is black, soggy, sour and indigestible. It is sold by weight, hence loaded with water and baked as little as possible to be bread and not dough. Some one has suggested that that bread was meant for food and drink together, and it is certain that it is so wet that it quickly mildews. But bad as it is it is scarce and expensive. A bread ticket calls for three-quarters of a pound, the daily allotment per person when I left the last of August. This costs at the rate of ten kopecks a pound. It used to be three and a half kopecks a pound, and good bread, too.

Butter, when it can be bought at all, was three rubles a pound, about a dollar. Excellent butter a year or two ago was less than fifty kopecks a pound, for Russia was rapidly becoming a dairy country. Veal, and veal is about the only meat to be had, was nearly a dollar a pound. Feed for cattle is so scarce and so expensive that cows are not allowed to grow into beef size, hence the prevalence of veal. Chickens may vary the menu, if you can afford to pay from three dollars upward. You could buy only a short-weight half pound of meat a day per person, except for the Sunday dinner, when a pound was allowed.

Even at the Hotel Militaire, where I lived most of the time, and where the food supply came from government sources, we had veal or its derivatives, hash, croquettes, etc., five days in the week. Sometimes they offered what they called beef, but it wasn’t. It was horsemeat, coarse and strong. Once a week or so we had chicken, a welcome change. When August came we began to have game, grouse of various kinds mostly. Game is very plentiful in Russia and Finland this year, because since the war men have hunted only one another. But game, which is a treat when you have it occasionally, is a punishment when you have it more than once or so a week. You detest it when it appears on the table three times a week, and if it appears oftener you choose a meatless day as an alternative.

Coffee was about a dollar and a half a pound, not so bad, and tea was even more moderate in price. What the Russian people would do if the tea gave out I cannot imagine. Everybody drinks tea, scalding hot, several times a day. Even the babies drink tea, and it is a fact that in the best babies’ hospital I saw in Russia the head nurse proudly showed me, in a hot water table, a whole row of nursing bottles full of tea for the sick babies’ evening repast. Tea they still have, but they are almost out of sugar to go with it. In a hotel or restaurant they serve you with three very tiny lumps of sugar with each glass of tea, and that is all you can have. If for any reason you do not use all your sugar you put it in your pocket. You do this whether you keep house or not, because you can’t buy much candy, and when meat is scarce everybody craves sweets.

Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me a dollar and ten cents.

Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people, men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long, patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line.

Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner.

It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food, and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki will not be the people to overcome it.

CHAPTER XVII GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR

After Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeated legions had fled from Russia to freeze and starve and die by thousands in a frenzied attempt to get back to France, the victorious commander of the Russian army said that his two greatest aides had been General January and General February. The relentless cold and storm of a Russian winter were foes too strong for Bonaparte to conquer. They sent him to St. Helena, and the same strong foes this winter are going to rout and banish the Bolsheviki. The Russian revolution began with a bread riot and it will culminate in a bread riot. When the people of Russia get hungry enough, they are going to stop talking about “no annexations or contributions,” “all the power to the soviets,” and the rest, and demand a government that shall govern, and as soon as possible put the country back on a normal basis. When the thermometer falls to 45 degrees below zero, and a fifty-miles-an-hour wind is driving sleet and snow in their faces, people can no longer stand twenty-four hours in line to buy food for their children. Especially when their clothes are thin and worn and their boots are dropping off their feet.

I have told something about the food situation in Russia. The clothing situation and the fuel situation are, if anything, worse. If you want to buy a pair of shoes in Petrograd you must take two days to do it and you must put much money in your purse. There is an American shoe store on the Nevsky Prospect and every day the line of people trying to get in and buy shoes was so great that it blocked traffic and the city authorities finally had to close the street entrance. The line now forms in a court or lane in the rear of the store and the customers are admitted, a few at a time, through the back door. This American shoe store is very popular because the shoes are of excellent quality and the prices are regarded as reasonable. A woman can buy a pair of boots there as low as $25. Men’s shoes are somewhat dearer. But the stock was running low when I was there in the summer, and when it gives out I don’t see how they are going to replenish it. On a corner of the Grand Morskaia there was another shoe store, in front of which a crowd stood all day long and all night. The queue extended around the corner, and I have seen it when it stretched to the Moika canal a very long block away. This is a store where cheaper shoes were sold. It represented an attempt on the part of one of the fleeting ministries to relieve the shoe shortage. Large quantities of shoes and leather were purchased and were then being distributed through authorized channels in the shop on the Morskaia.

In order to buy a pair of those shoes a man or a woman went there and got a place in line. Each stood in line until his or her turn came to be admitted to the shop, a long and weary business. When he gained admission to the shop and the clerk got around to waiting on him he received—a pair of shoes? Not a bit of it. He got a ticket with a number on it. The ticket entitled the customer to come back at some future date, stand in line and claim a pair of shoes which were probably at the time being made—provided he could afford to pay a minimum of ten dollars for them.

When I was in Poland with the women soldiers, the Botchkareva Battalion of Death, the regiment was delayed in its further progress toward the fighting line by a dearth of boots in which to march. About half the women soldiers received boots along with their other equipment before they left Petrograd, but the other half wore, with their khaki uniform, the women’s shoes, often worn and tattered, in which they had enlisted. One day there was great rejoicing in the barrack. The boots had come, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in sorting out from the pile a pair to fit each girl. I was interested in those boots, for they were mute but eloquent witnesses of the poverty of life in Russia. Not a pair was new. They were all second-hand, remade and mended boots, and I strongly suspect that most of them had been taken off the feet of dead soldiers. They had, in many cases, new feet or new soles, but the majority of them were merely mended and patched. Coarse, stiff, malodorous and badly put together as these were, the girls were only too glad to get them. The Adjutant, Skridlova, and one or two of the well-to-do soldiers had their boots made to order, and they paid ninety dollars a pair for them. Seventy-five dollars for a pair of women’s boots is not an unheard-of price.

What is true of boots and shoes is true of almost every other clothing commodity. I ran out of gloves while I was in Russia, but, after hearing what gloves cost in Petrograd, I went without. You could get cotton gloves as low as a dollar and eighty cents a pair. They were ugly and shapeless, but people bought and wore them. If you wanted a pair of kid gloves and you knew where you could find them and had time, you could buy them for three to five dollars. They were the kind that an American department store might put on a table in the center aisle and sell for fifty cents to attract customers in the dull season. A man pays a dollar for a fifteen-cent collar in Petrograd. He pays several dollars for a decent pair of socks. What he pays for a suit of clothes staggers the imagination. There are only two things that are cheap to buy in Russia just now: cats and dogs. You can buy a magnificent wolfhound or other thoroughbred dog, or a pure bred Persian or Angora cat for a song in Petrograd, because people can’t afford to feed pet animals. Mr. Basil Miles, attached to the Root mission, took home with him two Russian wolfhounds that are going to make him the most envied man in the next dog show in his town, and the song he sang to get them was too short to mention.

Russia is a very cold country and almost every one, rich and poor alike, wears furs. The rich wear sable, mink and ermine, and the poor wear rabbit and sheep skin. But furs just now are as difficult to buy as other clothing indispensables. There are several special reasons for this shortage of fur in a fur country. There are not so many people hunting furs since the war, and the pelts are scarcer; and besides, the Russians have never cured and dyed their own furs. They sent them to Germany to be prepared for market, and, of course, the war put a stop to that. Aside from these special reasons, the fur shortage and all the food, clothing and other shortages are caused by two main obstacles. There is plenty of food in the empire, plenty of raw materials for clothing. But the transportation system has almost broken down and they cannot distribute food or raiment. Also the factory system has all but broken down, and they cannot produce the clothing. There are besides minor and contributory obstacles, some of which I shall describe. The main reason why Russia will starve and freeze this winter is because the people of Russia have allowed their railroad system to go to pieces, and because they have, to an almost incredible extent, ceased to do any work.

I cannot speak as an expert about the railroad situation, nor would mere figures and statistics give the reader any adequate picture of the railroad demoralization. To say that on May 15, 1917, the then Minister of Ways and Communications reported to the Duma that more than 25 per cent. of the total number of locomotives in the empire were laid up for repairs wouldn’t begin to express the thing. The average reader does not know that 5 per cent. of “sick” locomotives is considered high by competent railroad managers. I might go further and say that the number of freight cars loaded from May 15 to May 31, 1917, was 87,000 poods less than the number loaded between those dates in 1916, but that would not mean much. Few outside of Russia know what a pood is. As a matter of fact it is thirty-six pounds. But figures cannot adequately describe the situation.

What told the tale of railroad demoralization to me was the constant anxiety I heard voiced on all sides by people trying to buy their winter stock of wood and coal. There is an endless quantity of wood in Russia. Great forests of pine and cedar and birch—beautiful forests. I had often marveled at them from the windows of my railway carriage passing through Finland and the country between Petrograd and Moscow. Plenty of this wood has been cut. I saw thousands and thousands of cords of it piled up along the railroad tracks, and of course there must have been much more elsewhere. Petrograd is built on a marsh and the ground is drained by picturesque if rather badly smelling canals which run through the city and empty into the Neva. Down one of the widest of these—the Moika, which I crossed every day—a constant line of barges, loaded with wood, floated slowly, drawn by horses and sometimes by men walking along a towpath beside the canal. I used to watch those bargeloads of wood and wonder why, with such an almost unparalleled means of distributing wood after it got there, the people of Petrograd should be troubled about the winter fuel supply. Not nearly enough of it was getting there last summer; that was all. The quantity that floated down the Moika and the other canals and got stacked up in woodyards and in the courtyards of apartment houses, hotels, hospitals, factories and even palaces, was not half the normal quantity. There weren’t enough flat cars and locomotives running to get the wood as far as the city limits.

I tried the experiment of keeping house with the wife of the Outlook correspondent after he left Russia on a mission. We had a charming little apartment offered us rent free, with a maid thrown in, if we would live in it and keep it from being looted. Every one who knew a Cossack or other reliable soldier, or an American, did that when they went to the country from Petrograd. We gave up housekeeping after a week and went back to hotels, partly because the maid could not get us enough to eat, and partly because we never had any hot water. The landlord of the apartment house had cut off the wood. He said that he couldn’t get wood enough to warm the house next winter, much less provide warm baths for the tenants in summer.

The railroad situation was visualized for me on a dreadful two days and nights’ journey I took on a Russian railroad last July. Miss Beatty, of the San Francisco Bulletin, was with me, and the train was so small and so crowded that the only berth we could get was an upper one three feet wide. The two of us slept in that berth, Miss Beatty’s head one way and mine the other. Every time the train struck a rough place on the rails the Bulletin came near losing its star reporter, for she had the outside, just above an open window. That railway carriage could have seated, by close crowding, eleven passengers. On the last night of the journey twenty-five people were packed into it. They took turns sitting down.

Every railroad train you get on is about as crowded as that, and one of the most difficult things to buy at present is a railroad ticket. To buy one you usually have to bribe the ticket agent or the hotel manager. You go to the office of the International Wagons-Lits and tell them that you want to go to Moscow or Kazan. You want to go to-morrow or in three days, some near date. The clerk shakes his head. “I might be able to get you a ticket and a berth in three days,” he will say. “Of course, you will have to pay a supplement; say, sixty rubles.” Pressed for particulars he will explain that some one will have to be paid to stand in line for the ticket. I paid forty rubles extra to Bennet’s, which is the Cook’s of Petrograd, for a ticket to Moscow, and that was considered a bargain. When I wanted to return I asked the hotel management in Moscow how much they would charge to send to the station and get me a ticket, and they said one hundred rubles. The ruble was then about thirty cents, so I would have had to pay, in addition to the cost of the ticket, which had just been raised about 50 per cent., thirty dollars. I got the ticket in almost the only other way possible. I acted as a courier carrying confidential papers from a foreign consulate in Moscow to an embassy in Petrograd, and the consul used his official influence to get me a ticket for the regular price only.

On the 21st of July the Minister of Ways and Communications ordered a reduction of 50 per cent. in the number of travelers passing between Petrograd and Moscow, in view, he explained, of the shortage of fuel and rolling stock. Soon it will be next to impossible to buy, for love or money, a ticket or a sleeping berth between the two points in Russia.

This is nearly true now on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Every Tuesday evening at 8 o’clock the weekly express on that famous line leaves the Nikolai station, Petrograd, and every berth is filled every week. What those passengers paid extra for their tickets forms one of the principal topics of conversation during the long trip over Siberia. The passengers beguile the weary journey swapping experiences of how they came to be there at all. I have known people who waited weeks for a chance to pay the extortionate supplement. The Trans-Siberian post train which leaves every night and makes stops along the way is a sight to behold before it leaves. The people crowd the train platform and fight for a place near the edge. As the train backs slowly into the station shed, the travelers run to meet it, climb in the windows, drag their women and children in, rush the platforms and fight like tigers to get in the doors. The number of carriages to each train has been reduced gradually until now the train is too short to hold the travelers.

But didn’t we send a railroad commission to Russia, and didn’t the papers say something about some 5,000 locomotives and 23,000 freight cars sent to Vladivostock? We did send a railroad commission, headed by John Stevens, of Panama canal fame, one of the greatest organizers and executives in the United States. This commission has done good work. It has shown the Russians how they could immediately increase the efficiency of their railroads 60 per cent. We have sent many locomotives and freight cars to Russia. Nevertheless the transportation problem remains unsolved.

CHAPTER XVIII WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS

John Stevens, head of the railroad commission sent to Russia from the United States, has shown the Russian government how to increase its transportation facilities sixty per cent. In a report made public in mid-August Mr. Stevens said that the chief cause of the railroad crisis was bad management. Locomotives traveled 2,800 versts a month when they could be made to travel 5,000 versts. A verst is about three-quarters of a mile. Twice as much freight as was being hauled could be carried, said Mr. Stevens. Freight cars were constantly being sent out only half loaded. Mr. Stevens recommended government dictatorship of all railroads, both publicly and privately owned. That was rather naïve, considering that the government was powerless to control, much less to dictate to, any department of activity in the empire. A little earlier Mr. Nekrassoff, then Minister of Ways and Communications, issued a circular in which he outlined his plan for coping with the railroad crisis. He advised turning the entire railroad system over to the workmen, the engineers, firemen, conductors and machinists. A shriek of protest went up from the engineering profession and a howl of laughter arose from the press of Russia. But the fact of the matter is that the railroads were and are still, for all practical purposes, in the hands of the working people, and so is every other industry in Russia.

One of the great dreams of the socialists and philosophical anarchists is of the day when the worker shall own his tools, as they put it, when all industry shall be owned by the people who operate the machines, and all profits shall be shared by them. It really is a great dream, and will probably be realized in some measure some day. But not now. The human race is not yet educated to such a Utopia. The strongest proof that the capitalistic system is not yet ready to pass is the well-known fact that the secret ambition of almost every human being in every walk of life is to become a capitalist, large or small. This has just been proved on an enormous scale in Russia. The workers have seized the factories, shops, department stores and offices, and in no instance of which I could learn, and I searched diligently, have they used their great opportunity wisely or unselfishly for the common good. They have used it to get all the money possible out of the employers and to render back the minimum of service.

This is what is the matter with the transportation system in Russia. It is the reason why the people of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities will go cold and hungry this winter, one reason why the death rate of children and old people, already appallingly large, will grow more appalling within the next few months; one reason, and a very strong one, why order has not been restored in Russia. High as are the prices of all food and manufactured articles, the working people, as a class, have money enough to pay for them, and not until the merchants’ stocks are completely gone and the weather gets too cold to stand in line long hours in order to buy will the purblind workers realize their situation. Not until then will they realize what their selfishness and cruel folly have done to themselves and the entire working class of the country.

So struck was I by the scarceness of goods in the shops and the soaring prices of almost every article that I went to the Minister of Labor and asked him to tell me something of industrial conditions of the country. I was not entirely ignorant of those conditions. I knew, for example, that Russia is not exclusively an agricultural country, that, on the contrary, her development as a manufacturing country has been going on by leaps and bounds, especially in the last dozen years. Russia has a proletariat and a factory system, although not quite as large proportionately as those of the United States. Her iron industry, her cotton mills, her machine shops are enormous and in normal times they are wonderfully productive. After the suppressed revolution of 1905-06 important reforms in the land laws were enacted, and for the first time the peasants were given their lands in fee simple. That is, they were given an opportunity in certain circumstances to take title to their share in communal lands. This gave them an opportunity to sell if they chose, and a large number of peasant artisans did sell their lands, moved into the cities and became factory workers. Before this time the factory workers had more or less alternated between town and rural life.

The leaders of the Social Democratic party encouraged by every means in their power the selling of lands by peasant owners, because they wanted the workers to move to town, organize in labor unions and become a political power. In their own words, they wanted to create a landless working class, one which, having no stake in property, would the more easily revolt against the government and more heartily support the movement to create a coöperative commonwealth. It was good reasoning up to a certain point. A man with a piece of land thinks twice before he puts that land in danger of being absorbed by his neighbors. He hesitates before he takes a course of action which might turn even a bad government out at least. The bad government protects his title. But the leaders of the Social Democrats left an important human element out of their reasoning. A landless man makes a good revolutionist, it is true, but he does not necessarily make a good coöperator. Nine and three-quarters times in ten he is just as strong for number one as the real estate owner. When he gets a chance to grab power and money he does it, and he divides up just as little as the others let him.

A story is told in Russia which illustrates this trait of character. Some one asked a peasant of Little Russia what he would do if he were made czar. “I’d steal a hundred rubles and run away,” was the prompt reply. In a word, that is virtually what the working people of Russia did as soon as the revolution of February, 1917, made them into individual czars of Russia.

When I called on the Minister of Labor and asked him what was the matter with industry, his face assumed an expression of mingled amusement and despair. “If you really want to know,” he said, in effect, “go and look at some of our factories.”

I was given an official document, elaborately stamped and signed, authorizing me to enter and inspect any factory in Petrograd, and I began, bright and early the next morning, with one of the largest munitions factories in the Viborg district of the city. I showed my pass to the man at the gate, who read it doubtfully, and said he didn’t think it was good. “What right has the Minister of Labor to give you permission to visit this plant?” he inquired. “If anybody had a right to give you such permission, I should think it would be the Minister of War, for only war materials are manufactured here. Anyhow, I don’t think you can get in.”

I asked him mildly if he was sure that he had the power to keep me out, and I suggested that he put the case up to a higher authority, the manager, for instance. He turned to a wall telephone in his little gate house and conversed with some one at the other end of the line. Then he said: “The committee is in session and will see you.”

A long walk through the enormous yard and past many shops brought me to the office building of the plant, and there, in a small room, I found the committee, that is, the group of workmen elected by the entire working force of the factory to manage the industry and to fix all conditions of labor. Every industry in Russia is thus managed. I had a long talk with this committee, but I did not get into the factory. The man would not permit me to get in. They wouldn’t even allow me to see any one connected with the office force. Kindly but firmly they gave me to understand that they were all the power there was in that plant and they could give me all the information I could possibly need. So I sat there for an hour or so, and, through my interpreter, learned how manufacturing is carried on when the workers own their tools.

Because I could carry but few notes out of the country, I am not certain how many delegates per thousand workers make up a committee of management in a Russian factory, but I think each unit of one hundred men elects a representative. Perhaps there are two hundred men to the unit. My memory for numbers is not always reliable. At all events, the committee members, who are usually the intelligent and highly paid workers, do no work except committee work. But they draw their full pay. The employer has no voice in the conduct of his own business. The committee tells him how much he pays his employees, what their hours of work are, when they arrive and when they depart and how much they produce. And the employer pays the committee for its kind words and deeds. I asked the particular committee which thus informed me if this seemed fair to the employer. Mostly the men said they thought it did. One man asked me who in my opinion ought to pay the committee members. I told him I thought the workers might pay at least a part of their salaries, and perhaps also give the employers a casting vote in case of a tie, or something like that. They seemed to find the idea humorous, all except one fine, thoughtful young fellow, who said: “There may be an element of unfairness in some of the present conditions, but time will adjust them. There is no question but that the workers should own the industries, and they will. The working class has never had a square deal and now that they have seized the powers of government, nothing less than confiscation of industries will satisfy them.”

The working class in Russia has had rather less of a square deal than any other in the modern world, it is true. The factory system being comparatively new in Russia, there has not been time for the workers to organize closely, and under the autocracy there was little or no chance to obtain enlightened factory legislation. There was hardly a chance for the Russian workman to attain a very high degree of skill in many industries. He could not, as a rule, learn the finest processes of his trade, because until the war broke out most of those processes were in the hands and under the control of Germany. When I was in Russia in 1906 one of the most striking things to me was the prevalence of German shopkeepers, German managers, German foremen. You hardly ever saw a Russian in command of any industry. I spoke of this to a Russian friend and told him that I should not like to see in my country all the business controlled by foreigners, for these Germans were not even Russian citizens. He shrugged his shoulders and said “Nitchevo,” which means almost anything and is a general expression of indifference or resignation to the inevitable. “We have no heads for that sort of thing, we Russians,” he apologized.

“But what if you should ever go to war with Germany?” I asked. And he, sobered a little, said: “We should have to learn to be business men and skilled mechanics, in that case, and we should have a devil of a time doing it.”

Eight years later, almost to a day, they did go to war with Germany, and they did have a devil of a time adjusting their industries to meet the crisis caused by the exodus of thousands of highly skilled German managers and department heads in hundreds of factories and shops throughout the empire.

One story told me in Moscow is representative, I believe. A very large factory taken over by the government for the fine toolmaking facilities its machines afforded was found to be managed exclusively by German foremen and managers. Not only had they drawn large salaries for years in that factory, but they had insisted on hiring for the last processes and the most highly skilled jobs workmen from Germany. They didn’t want, or rather the German government didn’t want, the Russian people to know how to do skilled work. They wanted to keep Russia in exactly the right condition for permanent commercial exploitation by the fatherland.

I go into this because I think it is only fair to the Russian working class to explain that they have not been allowed to develop the intelligence and skill which the English and American working classes have done. Because of this ignorance the Russians of the working class have in their few months’ debauch of liberty and the control of industry wrecked their country industrially and have brought themselves and their own people to the verge of starvation. They have done to their class approximately what the mutinous soldiers at the front did to the men who wanted to go forward and fight—shot them in the back. I know this, because I have seen it. The next factory I approached the committee let me in.

CHAPTER XIX WHY COTTON CLOTH IS SCARCE

When I got on the train to leave Russia for the United States the first familiar face I saw was that of Mr. Daniel Cheshire, mill owner and operator of Petrograd. “I’m going home to England to enlist,” he said, as we shook hands.

“What have you done with your mills?” I asked.

“I have left them to the Tavarishi,” replied Mr. Cheshire, “I thought I might as well.”

Daniel Cheshire is not the only large manufacturer who has abandoned his business after a vain struggle to cope with the situation created by the Russian revolution, and the taking over by the working people of the control of industry. Others have given up the struggle, and many more will probably follow their example. But Mr. Cheshire’s story I know at first hand. His abandonment of his mills is full of significance, partly because of the importance of his branch of manufacturing, and partly because his act may hasten the day when, through sheer lack of the necessities of life, the Russian people will cease pursuing their utopian dream and will content themselves with a government which, although still capitalistic, will rescue them from starvation and ruin.

Those who think of Russia as a land of snow and ice will be interested to learn that in Turkestan and Transcaucasia as well as in other provinces of the south and east, they raise millions of pounds of very good cotton, the seeds of which originally came from America. Those who think that every Russian peasant does nothing but farm will be surprised to hear that over a million Russians work in textile mills, principally cotton textiles.

When cotton spinning and weaving began in Russia the mill owners, in most cases, sent to England for their foremen and managers, and the descendants of some of these Englishmen still live and still manage cotton mills in Russia. The Cheshire family is a case in point. The original Cheshire went out from Manchester in the 1840’s to manage a small cotton spinning factory in Petrograd. He saved money, bought a partnership and enlarged the business. His sons enlarged it still more, and to-day his grandchildren own and operate ten large cotton mills in and around Petrograd. Daniel Cheshire, a keen young man of thirty-something, is head of the family and chief owner of the mills. That is, he was up to February, 1917. After that he wasn’t. The Tavarishi, or “comrades,” whose wages he paid, became the virtual owners then, and on August 30, 1917, they became, temporarily at least, the sole owners.

It was in one of the Cheshire cotton mills that I got the most intimate view of what becomes of industry when the workers own their tools. Perhaps it would be fairer to say, when the workers seize their tools. Some day, perhaps, they will find out how to own them honestly and then they will use them wisely and for the common good.

It was a happy accident that first led me into a Cheshire cotton mill. After being refused permission to inspect the big munition works to which I applied—refused by the workers’ committee, not by the proprietors—I wandered through the Viborg district of Petrograd until I found another large factory. This time the permit given me by the Minister of Labor worked better, and I was shown into the general office of the plant. It was a big, modern, up-to-date office, furnished with the usual desks, files, safes and the like, but to remind me that I was in revolutionary Russia, the walls were decorated with many red flags, and banners inscribed with white-lettered mottoes and declarations. The head of the workmen’s committee, who came forward to meet me, looked a little doubtful about letting me go through the mill, but just then the door opened and a strapping young Englishman came in. “See the works?” said he. “Of course you may. I’d like nothing better than to show my mills just now to newspaper people. I call them my mills yet, but only for a joke.”

He said something in Russian to the workman, who shrugged his shoulders and stood aside, and Mr. Cheshire and I went into the nearest mill room. It was a storeroom, as a matter of fact, the receiving room for the huge bales of coarse yarn spun in another mill. The bales were soft and made excellent beds, a fact that was not overlooked, for two tired Russian mill-workers reposed blissfully on a pile of bales as we passed through, sleeping the sleep of the just. They were not the only sleepers I saw in that mill. Several women were taking naps on piles of cloth near their machines, and a great many of the workers, men and women, might as well have been asleep, for they were doing no work. One woman was displaying a new pair of shoes to a group of other women, who stopped their machines to look. Shoes are so expensive in Russia at present that a new pair is worth looking at, I admit, but they might have postponed the exhibition until closing time. These women stood and discussed the shoes, from every point of view, apparently, nor did they go back to their machines when we stopped and discussed the women.

“Do you mean to tell me that you cannot order them back to their work?” I asked.

“Oh, I can order them,” was the reply. “But if they choose not to go that would make me look rather foolish, wouldn’t it?”

“You could discharge them, couldn’t you?” I countered.

“I certainly could not,” declared Mr. Cheshire. “Nobody can discharge an employé until the shop committee has sat on the case and decided that it does not want the man or woman in the mill. All I can do is to make my complaints to the committee and ask it to act.”

Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived there all his life except for a few years spent in an English school. Yet he speaks the English of his grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lancashire burr. He has the Lancastrian’s sense of humor also and he laughed even when he told me of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies of the revolution had plunged his business. The utter absurdity of it was as present in his mind as the disaster.

“Look at that man,” he said, pointing to a machine at which a man sat and wound cotton cloth into huge round cylinders. “He and the others at his particular job have had their wages raised to sixteen rubles (about $5.25) a day. Yes, of course. The committee decides on the wage scale. I am not consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing except a complimentary vote, one against hundreds. That chap gets sixteen rubles a day, and in addition I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift the roll of cloth off the machine.”

We passed into a print room still discussing the committee. I asked Mr. Cheshire if it was true that these workmen’s committees were highly paid men who performed no service to their employers and still received their regular pay.

“It is true,” he replied. Then he went on to tell me the following story: “The work we do in this room is something a little unusual in Russia. Few mills have these machines as yet, and our product is almost the only cotton goods of the kind possible to buy in Russian markets since the war. Before that a great deal of it was imported from England and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, and not long ago one of our men complained that he couldn’t buy it at all. ‘Of course you cannot,’ I told him, ‘because these mills are turning out very little of it. Go into the print room and see for yourself how many machines are idle for lack of workers.’ And then I made him this offer, for he was a member of the committee: ‘Let me have four men of your committee back to work on these machines, and I will guarantee that you will soon be able to buy the goods you want.’ Well, he agreed, and he got the rest of the committee to agree, and I got the men back. But what do you think those four men demanded? They said that they had been doing hard mental work on the committee for two months, and they thought before they went back to the machines they ought to have a month’s vacation with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them I’d close the works first. But since then I understand that the committee has begun to discuss the two months on and one month off as a future policy. They say that mental work—they call committee meetings mental work—is much harder than physical labor.”

“I’m glad they are finding it out,” I remarked. “Perhaps after a while they will discover that even you belong to the proletariat.”

“If they raise the wages again,” said Mr. Cheshire, “I mean to ask them to give me a job. I’ll have to. Then they’ll have some real mental work finding out how to pay me or themselves either. This factory and all the others in our name have been running farther and farther behind for months. Soon we shall have to close. We should have been closed before now except that we hoped that a strong government would be formed and industry as well as the army and navy would be placed under a dictatorship.”

The committees have created an eight-hour day in this particular industry. Some industries have a six-hour day, and I was told that numbers of working people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good authority, that certain groups favored a complete cessation of all factory work during the three hot months of summer.

Mr. Cheshire’s mills were supposed to run eight hours a day, but he declared that he would be satisfied, in present circumstances, to get a good, solid five hours’ work out of his people. If they would stay on the job and actually produce for five hours every working day he thought he might avert bankruptcy. “We close at five,” he told me. “But along about 4 o’clock you watch them begin to go home.”

I watched and they did. Man after man and woman after woman stopped all work and began to put on their shoes. Many millworkers work barefooted. They gathered in little knots at a window and looked out, talking aimlessly. They strolled about the rooms. Some just stopped work and went out. At half past four in the rooms through which I walked, not half the machines were running.

“Is it really like this in all the mills and factories of Russia?” I asked, “or is this mill an exception to the rule? Is it worse than the average?”

“It is no worse than most,” was the reply. “It is better than some. Industrial Russia has completely broken down in some places. It is rapidly breaking down everywhere.”

What I saw afterwards absolutely confirmed this statement. The industrial world is as much in the hands of the Bolsheviki or extremists as are the councils of workmen’s and soldiers’ delegates. While the provisional government of the early weeks of the revolution discussed ways and means whereby the workers in mills and factories might gradually acquire an interest in their industries and a voice in the councils of the managers, the workers settled the whole thing by turning the employers out and taking over the industries themselves. They have voted themselves enormous salaries, short hours and little work. But they have done little or nothing to insure the permanence of the salaries. Soon there will be, instead of an eight hour day, no working day at all. All the shops and factories will close.

In Moscow is the largest and finest department store in Russia. It is an English concern, Muir & Merrilies, managed and largely owned by Mr. William L. Cazalet. I know him well, and his testimony, when I saw him in August, bore out this statement. The committee in Muir & Merrilies voted that they found it inconvenient to have clerks and other employés go home for lunch at different hours. They therefore ordered the store closed every day from 12 to 2 o’clock. The store was accordingly closed.

“I don’t mind,” said Mr. Cazalet cheerfully. “My stocks are running low, the transportation system is on the verge of collapse, and I can’t get any more goods. As each line of goods is exhausted I shall close the department. When the time comes I shall close the store and go home to England for a vacation.”

He will go, as Daniel Cheshire went, others will follow, and the workers will own their tools. They won’t own anything else.