to run it. Of course, the workmen had not got a thousand rubles apiece, ‘so uncle offered to pay it in for them, on the understanding that they would eventually pay him back.' This was illegal, but the little town was a long way from the centre of things, and it seemed a good way out of the difficulty. He did not expect to get it back, but he hoped in this way to keep control of the tannery, which he wished to develop, having a paternal interest in it.

Things worked very well. They They elected a committee of control. 'Uncle was elected president, I was elected vice-president, and there were three workmen. We are working on those lines to this day. They give uncle fifteen hundred rubles a month, me a thousand, and the bookkeeper a thousand. The only difficulty is that the men will treat uncle as the owner and this may mean trouble if things go wrong. Uncle is forever telling them, "It's your factory, don't call me master," and they reply, "Yes, it's our factory all right, but you are still master, and that must be.'

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Trouble came fast enough, with the tax levied on the propertied classes. 'Uncle,' very wisely, had ceased to be a property owner. He had given up his house to the factory, and been allotted rooms in it, as president of the Factory Soviet. He was, therefore, really unable to pay when the people from the District Soviet came to tell him that he had been assessed to pay a tax of sixty thousand rubles. He explained the position. The nephew was also present and joined in the argument, whereupon the tax collector consulted a bit of paper and retorted: 'A tax of twenty thousand has been assessed on you, too. Be so good as to put your coat on.'

That meant arrest, and the nephew said he had five thousand rubles and

would pay that but could pay no more. Would that do?

'Very well,' said the tax collector, 'fetch it.'

The nephew fetched it.

'And now put your coat on.' 'But you said it would be all right if I paid the five thousand!'

"That's the only way to deal with people like you. We recognize that your case is hard, and we dare say that you will get off. But the Soviet has told us to collect the whole tax or the people who refuse to pay it, and they have decreed that if we come back without one or the other we shall go to prison ourselves. You can hardly expect us to go and sit in prison out of pity for you. So on with your coat and come along.'

They went, and at the militia headquarters were shut into a room with barred windows, where they were presently joined by most of the other rich men of the town, all in a rare state of indignation, and some of them very angry with uncle' for taking things so quietly. 'Uncle was worrying about nothing in the world but the tannery and the leather works, which he was afraid might get into difficulties now that both he and I were under lock and key.'

The plutocracy of the town being thus gathered in the little room at the militia house, their wives came, timorously at first, and chattered through the windows. My informant, being unmarried, sent word to two or three of his friends, in order that he might not be the only one without someone to talk with outside. The noise was something prodigious, and the head of the militia finally ran out into the street and arrested one of the women, but was so discomfited when she removed her shawl and he recognized her as his hostess, at her house where he had been billeted as a soldier, that

he hurriedly let her go. The extraordinary parliament between the rich men of the town and their wives and friends, like a crowd of hoodie crows, chattering outside the window, continued until dark.

Next day the workmen from the tannery came to the militia house and explained that uncle had really ceased to be a member of the propertied classes, that he was necessary to them as president of their Soviet, and that they were willing to secure his release by paying half of the tax demanded from him out of the factory funds. Uncle got together thirty thousand, the factory contributed another thirty, and he was freed, being given a certificate that he had ceased to be an exploiter or a property owner, and would, in future, be subject only to such taxes as might be levied on the working population. The nephew was also freed, on the ground that he was wanted at the leather works.

I asked him how things were going now. He said, 'Fairly well, only uncle keeps worrying because the men still call him "master." Otherwise, he is very happy because he has persuaded the workmen to set aside a large proportion of the profits for developing the business and building a new wing to the tannery.'

'Do the men work?'

'Well,' he said, 'we thought that when the factory was in their own hands they would work better, but we do not think they do so; not noticeably anyhow.'

'Do they work worse?'

'No, that is not noticeable either.' I tried to get at his political views. Last summer he had told me that the Soviet government could not last more than another two or three months. He was then looking forward to its downfall. Now he did not like it any better, but he was very much afraid of

war being brought into Russia, or rather, of the further disorders which war would cause. He took a queer sort of pride in the way in which the territory of the Russian republic was gradually resuming its old frontiers. 'In the old days no one ever thought the Red army would come to anything,' he said. 'You can't expect much from the government, but it does keep order, and I can do my work and rub along all right.' It was quite funny to hear him in one breath grumbling at the revolution and in the next anxiously asking whether I did not think they had weathered the storm, so that there would be no more disorders.

Knowing that in some country places there had been appalling excesses, I asked him how the Red Terror that followed the attempt on the life of Lenine had shown itself in their district. He laughed.

'We got off very cheaply,' he said. 'This is what happened. A certain rich merchant's widow had a fine house, with enormous stores of all kinds of things, fine knives and forks, and too many of anything. For instance, she had twenty-two samovars of all sizes and sorts. Typical merchant's house, so many tablecloths that they could not use them all if they lived to be a hundred. Well, one fine day, early last summer, she was told that her house was wanted and that she must clear out. For two days she ran hither and thither trying to get out of giving it up. Then she saw it was no good, and piled all those things, samovars and knives and forks and dinner services and tablecloths and overcoats (there were over a dozen fur overcoats) in the garrets, which she closed and sealed, and got the president of the Soviet to come and put his seal also. In the end things were so friendly that he even put a sentinel there to see that the

seal should not be broken. Then came the news from Petrograd and Moscow about the Red Terror, and the Soviet, after holding a meeting and deciding that it ought to do something, and being on too good terms with all of us to do anything very bad, suddenly remembered poor Maria Nicolaevna's garrets. They broke the seals and tumbled out all the kitchen things knives, forks, plates, furniture, the twenty-two samovars, and the overcoats, took them in carts to the Soviet and declared them national property. National property! And a week or two later there was a wedding of a daughter of one of the members of the Soviet, and somehow or other the knives and forks were on the table, and as for samovars there were enough to make tea for a hundred.

February 14.

After yesterday's talk with a capitalist victim of the revolution I am glad for the sake of contrast to set beside it a talk with one of the revolution's chief theorists. The leather worker illustrated the revolution as it affects an individual. The revolutionary theorist was quite incapable of even considering his own or any other individual interests and thought only in terms of enormous movements in which the experiences of an individual had only the significance of the adventures of one ant among a myriad. Bucharin, member of the old economic mission to Berlin, violent opponent of the Brest peace, editor of Pravda, author of many books on economics and revolution, indefatigable theorist, found me drinking tea at a table in - the Métropole.

I had just bought a copy of a magazine which contained a map of the world, in which most of Europe was colored red or pink for actual or potential revolution. I showed it to Bu

charin and said, 'You cannot be surprised that people abroad talk of you as of the new Imperialists.'

Bucharin took the map and looked at it.

'Idiotism, rank idiotism!' he said 'At the same time,' he added, 'I do think we have entered upon a period of revolution which may last fifty years before the revolution is at last victorious in all Europe and finally in all the world.'

Now, I have a stock theory which I am used to set before revolutionaries of all kinds, nearly always with interesting results. I tried it on Bucharin. I said:

'You people are always saying that there will be revolution in England. Has it not occurred to you that England is a factory and not a granary, so that in the event of revolution we should be immediately cut off from all food supplies? According to your own theories, English capital would unite with American in insuring that within six weeks the revolution had nothing to eat. England is not a country like Russia, where you can feed yourselves somehow or other by simply walking to where there is food. Six weeks would see starvation and reaction in England. I am inclined to think that a revolution in England would do Russia more harm than good.'

Bucharin laughed. 'You old counter-revolutionary!' he said. "That would be all true, but you must look further. You are right in one thing. If the revolution spreads in Europe, America will cut off food supplies. But by that time we shall be getting food from Siberia.'

'And is the poor Siberian railway to feed Russia, Germany, and England?'

'Before then Pichon and his friends will have gone. There will be France to feed, too. But you must not forget

that there are the cornfields of Hungary and Rumania. Once civil war ends in Europe, Europe can feed herself. With English and German engineering assistance we shall soon turn Russia into an effective grain supply for all the workingmen's republics of the Continent. But even then the task will be only beginning. The moment there is revolution in England, the English colonies will throw themselves eagerly into the arms of America. Then will come America's turn, and, finally, it is quite likely that we shall all have to combine to overthrow the last stronghold of capitalism in some South African bourgeois republic. I can well imagine,' he said, looking far away with his bright little eyes through the walls of the dark dining room, that the workingmen's republic of Europe may have to have a colonial policy of an inverse kind. Just as now you conquer backward races in order to exploit them, so in the future you may have to conquer the colonists to take from them the means of exploitation. There is only one thing I am afraid of.'

The New Statesman

'And what is that?'

'Sometimes I am afraid that the struggle will be so bitter and so long drawn out that the whole of European culture may be trampled underfoot.'

I thought of my leather worker of yesterday, one of thousands experiencing in their own persons the appalling discomforts, the turnover and revaluation of all established values that revolution, even without death and civil war, means to the ordinary man, and, being perhaps a little fainthearted, I finished my tea in silence. Bucharin, after carelessly opening these colossal perspectives, drank his tea in one gulp, prodigiously sweetened with my saccharin, reminded me of his illness in the summer, when Radek scoured the town for sweets for him, curing him with no other medicine, and then hurried off, fastening his coat as he went, a queer little De Quincey of revolution, to disappear into the dusk before, half running, half walking, as his way is, he reached the other end of the big, dimly-lit, smoke-filled dining

room.

KING EDWARD's affection for France bore its richest and most conspicuous fruit during his short nine years' reign; but the beneficent sentiment was a dominant feature of his life through all the long years which preceded his accession to the throne. The friendly feeling may almost be said to have been implanted in his nature at his birth, and to have steadily developed in strength from boyhood. The birth and growth of the sentiment are something of psychological riddles. Heredity and the domestic environment of his early career promised a very different affinity. Lineal ties and family associations might well have fostered German sympathies to the exclusion of any other continental leanings. So marked a reaction against genetic tendencies as King Edward's French predisposition exemplifies is worthy of a closer study than has yet been given it. But it is only incidentally that I deal here with the psychological problem. My purpose is to throw some fresh light on the early phases of a deviation from inherited instinct, to which the civilized progress of the world owes a very substantial debt.

King Edward, the eldest son of a German father and of an English mother in whose veins flowed much German blood, was baptized in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, on January 25, 1842. The most notable of his six godparents, of whom two only were English and the rest were German, was the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, whose faith in the obsolete doctrine of the divine right of monarchy

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adumbrated the fatal prepossession of his grand-nephew, the ex-Kaiser, William II. Very highly did the Prussian autocrat value the sponsorial honor, and he gave eager proof of his satisfaction by making the highest contribution at his disposal to his godson's dignity. The infant was barely christened before he was admitted to the most illustrious Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. The ruler of Austria was unwilling to lag behind his royal brother in proofs of his interest in the infant heir-apparent of England. The Austrian Grand Cross of St. Andrew was quickly forwarded to Windsor to adorn the infant's breast beside the insignia of the Black Eagle. No time was to be lost, it seemed, in formally sealing the infant of the Teuton tribe.

Yet fancy may well suggest that a fairy godmother of French lineage hovered unseen about the Prince's cradle to parry the influence of the imposing manifestations of Teutonic favor. When the Prince entered the world the Anglo-French sky was beset by its normal cloud. Rival claims to Egypt threatened a breach of the peace. But just when intelligence was first dawning on the child, the darkness brightened, albeit momentarily. It was a happy omen that then the words 'entente cordiale' were first heard in the world of Anglo-French diplomacy. In September, 1843, before the close of the second year of the Prince's life, M. de Jarnac, French Chargé d'Affaires in London, was on a visit at Haddo House to Lord Aberdeen, the English Foreign Secretary. The two men

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