in the towns, or of the peasantry in the country, were prepared to face the very difficult problems of reconstruction which immediately demanded solution. Had not the reactionists of Tsardom attempted a counterrevolt of their own, in order to anticipate a popular rising, the upheaval would hardly have taken place at that particular time. The frequent disturbances in the Germanised capital of Petrograd which followed upon the first successful rising, the war with the German invaders on the front, the mutinies of the troops themselves, due to Bolshevist propaganda and bribery from without-all this necessarily complicated the situation and diverted the attention of Western Europe from the gigantic economic issues below.

We are, in fact, looking on at a day-to-day development of the French Revolution as displayed in a newspaper cinematograph on an enormously greater scale.* A vast rural population of some 165,000,000 persons, in the 18th-century or 17th-century stage of development and culture, heavily taxed and appallingly poor, is striving for emancipation and endeavouring to take final possession of the soil. This population consists of various races and nations, speaking different languages, and all with different histories behind them. At the same time, the proletariat of the great cities, which is not more than nine per cent. of the total inhabitants of Russia, created partly by the steady expropriation of the peasantry, partly by the policy of State industries, and partly by the introduction of foreign capital and foreign employment on a large scale-this proletariat of the cities, divorced from the soil and possessed of no property but the power to labour in their bodies, is endeavouring to apply the latest theories of the scientific Socialism of the West to a state of society which is not

The difference between the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution is that, whereas the French had a class already developed which was versed in local administration and capable of taking up the reins of Government, the Russians scarcely possess such a class, outside the corrupt and hated bureaucracy of the tchinovniks. That, as Russia is now sadly discovering to her cost, is a very serious matter indeed. Even the anarchical outbreaks of the Jacquerie, sometimes leading to terrible outrages of which we are allowed to hear little in England, are not so dangerous as this entire lack of capable and trustworthy native administrators.

yet nearly ripe for the successful application of such theories. Nothing of the kind has been seen before in history. The entire situation is wholly exceptional.

The social and economic development of modern Russia begins with the emancipation of the serfs in the period 1861-1866. This emancipation, as all the world knows, was, economically speaking, much more nominal than real. Instead of recognising the complementary portion of the old statement of the peasants: 'We are the Lord's; the land is ours,' Alexander II relieved the serfs from their personal servitude to the nobles, but only gave them the land under conditions that left them, in most respects, worse off than before. Had the Tsar Alexander risked a revolt of the boyars, and given the land outright to the peasantry (as Joseph II of Austria had attempted to do in Bukovina), then a great and beneficial revolution would have been peacefully effected, and his dynasty might have been permanently secured on the throne.

Probably the mischiefs arising out of further unconscious economic changes could not have been averted; but the emancipated serfs would have obtained a generation or two of comparative well-being. As it was, these unpropertied freedmen acquired their land at a very heavy cost, by payments spread over fifty years; State taxation became heavier and heavier; while, all the time, the substitution of production for sale in place of production for use by themselves, the lord and his retainers, made the emancipated serfs mere slaves of their unfortunate surroundings. Simultaneously, the increasing debt of the Russian Government to the capitalism of Western Europe, for strategical railways, State industries and the like, established a drain of agricultural produce, to pay interest on these advances, without commercial return, which intensified the difficulties of the rural districts. All this combined pressure on the peasantry gradually created a non-agricultural class, which was attracted to the cities by the State industries set on foot by the Government and fostered by loans and investments from without. Thus the city proletariat of Russia, still a small minority of the population, is mainly a factitious growth, fostered from without by State organisation within.

As a consequence, the economic and intellectual antagonism between country and town, which results everywhere from the system of production for profit, has been intensified in Russia. Peasants are producing cereals and other agricultural commodities by primitive methods of cultivation. They do this more and more for sale for cash on the market, in order to pay taxes which are rigidly exacted in cash, to meet the usurious charges on the debts they have been forced to contract, and to purchase improved tools and manures where they can. But in every case they want to get high prices for what they have to sell, as their sole means of relief from crushing burdens. Similarly, high prices for the goods which are the output of their interminable toil on small home industries during the long winter months can alone give hope of squeezing a little better wage from their employers or the middlemen.

On the other hand, the new wage-earning townsfolk want to get those necessaries of life which the peasants offer as cheaply as possible, so that their own scanty wages may go farther. And the land cultivators cannot escape from the effects of an economic pressure, the development of which they can neither understand nor cope with, and the expansion of which they are unable to resist. This was a serious situation even in peaceful and quiet periods. Amid revolution and war, it becomes nothing short of appalling. Though the drain to the West for interest on foreign loans and invested capital, amounting to not less than 55,000,000l. a year out of a total value of exports, estimated in 1912 at 160,000,000l., was temporarily suspended in 1914, owing to the impossibility of exportation, the pressure of taxation on the mass of the peasantry was not reduced to that extent. And, from the moment when the revolution began, the necessity for funds forced the Government to issue paper money in excess of any possible power to meet it in cash. In consequence, the value of the rouble, remaining, for the sale of agricultural produce, at the old amount of two shillings before the war (as against the nominal amount of three shillings), fell for the purchasing of articles required by the peasants for tillage, etc., to the level of sixpence or less, and the price of such articles rose accordingly to an unprecedented height.

Even the seizure of the unredeemed land, or the repudiation of redemption payments, could not obviate the economic crisis. The peasants, naturally enough, would not sell their grain, upon which at least they could exist, for a price reckoned in paper money at its old value, when they could get none of their necessaries except at inordinate rates for the deteriorating paper thus paid to them. Therefore, the real Russian Land Revolution is beginning under conditions which may bring about first anarchy and then reaction. Yet production for profit instead of use, the antagonism of town and country, crushing taxation, and deteriorating paper money-all these only hasten the greater economic change. Reaction itself, even with a full force of a reorganised army behind it, could not withstand the march of economic development. The peasantry demand the land, and they will get it. They are refusing to fight the foreign invaders at the front, in order that they may not forgo their share of the redistribution at the rear. The entire peasantry of Russia, with all the differences that separate them, have in the main the same desires. In the Ukraine, with its old-settled population and eagerness for national recognition and local self-government; in Siberia, where immigrants are increasing more rapidly than in Canada; in the rich but deteriorating black-earth region, and in the poor soil of the forest districts, the people demand the ownership of the land, light taxation, relief from usury, and the removal of irresponsible bureaucrats. However ignorant they may be, they all understand that programme, and yearn for its accomplishment.

The civilised world has, in fact, entered upon a period of unrest which greatly transcends in extent, as well as in importance, the European disturbances of 1848. Probably it will far surpass even the epoch of the French Revolution in its influence upon the destinies of mankind. But the character of the transformations brought about depends upon the stage of economic and social development that has been reached in every nation affected. Certainly, the general movement will be towards Collectivism and Socialism; but it is absurd to compare vast rural nations such as Russia, China, or even France, with Great Britain, Germany, America or Belgium, where the

huge machine industry, with its complementary evolution of Trusts, Combines and State Control, has developed almost to its full extent. In the former countries there are several steps of social readjustment to be mounted, before the capitalist system of production of goods for profit, through exchange on the world-market, gets far enough to render the socialisation of the means of creating wealth, and the consequent production for use instead of profit, upon an enormous scale, not only possible and desirable but inevitable. Japan has shown us that a nation of our time may, in forty years, pass through changes which Western Europe required centuries to traverse. But such a rapid transformation is very rare; and in any event, quickly or slowly, the successive stages must be realised and lived through before the ultimate reconstitution is attained. That is why revolution in a country such as Russia, just emerging from what economists call natural production, involves modifications in ideas and in social affairs totally different from what revolution in a highly-developed industrial country, such as England or Germany, would produce.

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the human race than the unconsciousness of mankind in their progress from one period of social development to another. Even a hundred and fifty years ago, or less, the greatest brains of our own period understood no more of approaching social changes than the ablest philosophers of antiquity did about the rise of slavery or its decline. The conditions which made for slaveowning had created a form of society apparently so permanent that any crucial change seemed impossible. Religion gave no hint; ethics led nowhither; only economics, the lessons of which were entirely unapprehended, at last enforced a change and compelled the gradual transformation. The power of the great landlords and slave-owners of Rome and antiquity generally declined, not by the invasion of the barbarians from without, but by causes which silently sapped the edifice within.

A really complete revolution may be accomplished without bloodshed, at the critical time, when all is ready for the change. But the revolts against an existing form of domination, before that stage has been reached,