money "in so short a time. With these slips of paper the Bolshevik magnates not only paid their own way handsomely, voting themselves salaries adequate to their high estate, but they also paid the members of the Red Guard-Kerensky's creation-magnificently, giving them twenty or twenty-five rubles a day, about equal, at the old rate of exchange, to $5,000 a year. No private soldiers were ever so splendidly remunerated, and the right to plunder must have brought in at least an equal amount.

Meanwhile, no taxes were collected, no revenue came in. More than that, the Bolsheviki, as a part of the general process of "breaking down," have smashed the tax-collecting machinery; among other things, all the office records are gone. Of course, when in a corner like this, you can levy upon capital to a certain extent, and this the Bolsheviki have largely done; but, in the first place, under the happy conditions which the Bolsheviki themselves created, capital in Russia has almost absolutely ceased to be productive; and, in the second place, the Bolsheviki appear to have pretty well robbed the roost already. It is a fair assumption that in the coming fiscal year-supposing that the accounts are ever made out-the revenue of Russia will be practically nil. Already the whole machinery has practically stopped, under the wholesale national "sabotage" of the Bolsheviki.

But, when revenue fails, and fails in this wholesale and sweeping way, it is futile to talk about the other departments -the "spending" departments-of the Russian Government. Trotsky" talks, in his large way, about a new army of 250,000, of 500,000, of 1,500,000; he may be mad enough to believe his own dreams, as he may have believed in them a few weeks ago, when he was issuing ultimatums to the German General Staff. But he can hardly expect the rest of the world to take him seriously. It is, of course, a pure illusion to believe that, after their great triumph at Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviki "demobilized" the Russian army. In reality there was nothing left to demobilize. The Russian army had simply slunk home. And, as it happens, the Bolsheviki had presciently provided them with occupation on their home-coming, which is likely to keep them pretty closely at work for a considerable time to come, and is likely, further, to work havoc among certain German

schemes.

The situation is this: bad and deadening as was the old

Russian communal village land tenure, there was, nevertheless, some slight opportunity for the able, honest, industrious farmer to extend his holdings of land to some small degree, to get some reward for his better husbandry. So there has grown up a considerable inequality in size and value, not only between the holdings of one village and another, but between the holdings of one peasant family and another within the same village.

The Bolsheviki gained power in two ways: by outbidding Kerensky for the support of the Red Guards (whom they proceeded to pay with fiat paper money), and by promising land to the peasants. The first proposal was to divide among the peasants the possessions of the more successful landowners, which were islands of intelligence and skill in the midst of the primeval inefficiency of the peasantry. But appetite comes with eating, and a second edict announced that peasant holdings also were to be divided, so that "the least should have as much as the greatest."

Consider the beauty of that arrangement. At this moment there are, it must be remembered, no law courts or legal authorities whatever. What Kerensky left the Bolsheviki swept away. There is, therefore, no authority whatever throughout the length and breadth of Russia with power to guarantee a land title. More than that, there is absolutely no organization existing that could conceivably survey and allot the land of the Russian villages, according to the Bolshevik principle. Even in peaceful times, what a force of surveyors would be required to map Russia's billion acres and divide it into equal plots! The task would, under the most favorable circumstances possible, take a long series of years. But the Russian snows are already melted. The time for the Spring sowing is not merely near; it has already come. Think, then, of the conditions besetting the Spring sowing in Russia in this year of grace, with the armed, demoralized hordes from the front, the men who once were Russia's army, trooping back to the villages and, after they have sacked and burned the houses of the larger landowners, demanding a division of the land of the peasants, according to the Bolshevik formula. Imagine the wild fury of the more successful peasants, holders of the larger, better plots, when told that they must divide up with their more thriftless, stupider neighbors. Imagine, also the ubiquitous rifles and cartridges, the absolute dissolution of discipline, and it would

seem to be pretty clear that the Spring sowing in Russia will take place, let us say, under considerable difficulties.

In other words, the latest Bolshevik formula is calculated to add the last possible degree of anarchic destruction to a land that is well-nigh ruined already. And for exactly that reason we are justified in thinking of this as Russia's darkest hour, the hour before the dawn.

For, it must be remembered, these Russian peasants have been promised the joys of paradise; and, to purchase these joys, they have practically sold their souls. But, like all who have made a bargain with the Adversary, they are already reaping the bitterest disillusion. For they thought it would be all take and no give, and they are already finding that it is all give and no take. Not only are there no joys of paradise, but there is every likelihood that they will fight ferociously through the season of sowing, and when the harvest comes they will starve to death in millions. That would seem to be the practically inevitable working of the Bolshevik formula.

But this condition of things seems likely to have two results: First, it seems highly improbable that there will be any large supplies of Russian grain available for Germany in the coming year, so that once more the shrewd German calculation will have over-reached itself; and, secondly, the Russian people are likely to sound such depths of misery as will provoke an inevitable reaction.

In justice to these deluded Russian peasants, it must be remembered that all their prophets, from Hertzen to Tolstoi, have assured them that they were entitled to the land of Russia; and, indeed, the present situation in Russia is an almost exact working out of the Tolstoian gospel of nonresistance, anarchism and free soil. Therefore the Bolsheviki are quite logically pensioning Tolstoi's family. But, when the Russian peasants find that the realization of the principles of their prophets lands them not in paradise but in a hell of internecine strife, they are likely to turn their backs upon these prophets and set their faces once more toward the old ways. They have already shown that their souls are fluid, almost vapor-like in their capacity for sudden change, and we are permitted to believe in the possibility of an equally complete change in the opposite sense. And the Bolshevik prophets and their German backers are quite likely to be swept away by such a reaction.

But we can, perhaps, reach the same result by considering the whole problem in a quite different way, along the line of national characteristics and international problems. At any rate, the experiment is worth trying.

The menace is that the Germans will expand to the east and south-east, not only along the Berlin-Bagdad line, but along the far longer line from Berlin to Vladivostok. And, according to the German calculation, there seems to be nothing to keep them back. Their victory seems already complete and overwhelming. Yet perhaps even the Germans are beginning to distrust the very completeness of their seeming victories. They have at least had some opportunity to learn.

Consider, then, this diverging line running from Berlin to Bagdad, from Vienna to Vladivostok. On its eastward trend from Berlin it runs first into Polish territory. Poland, for the moment, is prostrate, and the Germans are, no doubt, ignorant enough of human nature, and of the unconquerable soul, to believe that Poland will remain prostrate, the docile slave of Germany, to the end of time. But what is the reality concerning Poland? It is, I think, something like this: Never, through all her past history, has Poland suffered more atrociously than she has suffered since she was "liberated" by Germany and Austria in the late summer of 1915. And, just because of her terrible and unspeakable sufferings, never was there a time when the flame of Polish patriotism burned so brightly, with such invincible valor, as at the present moment. We know very well that Belgium, that occupied France, have not become "reconciled " to their bestial conquerors; that the Germans there are living upon a volcano. The same thing is true of Poland; perhaps even more true, since Poland's sufferings have been, and are, if possible, more atrocious. There is in Poland a steady tension of spiritual force that force so unintelligible to the German mind, so disconcerting in its results-which only awaits its hour to blast and destroy the brutal tyranny, the detestable hypocrisy, which to-day weighs Poland down to the dust. Nothing is needed but a favorable opportunity, and we shall see all Poland in a flame, a crusade of liberation.

From Vienna, on the long line to Vladivostok, one comes equally to Slavonic land. And the Czechs, the Moravians, the Slovaks have as keen a spirit of nationality, as deeprooted and hearty a detestation of their Teuton tyrants, as have the Poles. Further, they have long realized their close

ness to the Poles, in blood, in speech, in spiritual life; they have realized, too, that the Teuton, whether he be called Austrian or Prussian, is the common foe. If one could imagine the German bled white and bleached, denatured in all possible ways, the residuum would, nevertheless, be such that men and women of other races would find them almost unassimilable. But when the German has, by the curious processes of his psychological training, raised into high relief all in him that is most Teutonic, then he becomes simply intolerable to any other race; he must in time, one would think, become intolerable even to himself.

And it happens that the Slavonic temperament is peculiarly disinclined to stomach the German; every characteristic is antipathetic. Time and close association do nothing to bridge the chasm. And, if this close association be, as it now is, of the nature of unmeasured German tyranny, with every element of atrocity, then the longer that association continues, the more violent will be the tendency to explode. One may say, indeed, that the national spirit of both Pole and Czech is steadily growing in clarity and strength, in virtue precisely of this Teuton oppression.

The same thing is true of the Slavonic region which one enters, on the road from Vienna toward Bagdad: the region inhabited by a single race with many names: Serb, Croat, Montenegrin, Sclavonian, Bosnian, Dalmatian. All these speak practically the same tongue and are of practically the same blood. And, for centuries, during which they suffered all things from the oppression of the Turks, their national sense and national genius simply grew more clear, more fervent, more unconquerable. Even the Bulgarians may once more return to the right way, if they receive adequate punishment for the base treachery of their attack on Serbia, already beset by the two great, cowardly empires on the north. One is inclined to believe that, but for the Satanic promptings of Austria, and of Austria's tool, Tsar Ferdinand, the Bulgarians would not have behaved so basely in 1913 and again in 1915. But it will take pretty sharp chastisement, thoroughly to convince them of sin.

Moving eastward from Poland, Bohemia, the Slovak and Serbian region, we come to Ukrainia and Russia. Exactly by what means the pro-Austrian junta that called itself the Ukrainian Rada was able to seize power and hold it long enough to make an infamous treaty with the Teutons, we