ate: qualities that seem the natural complements of his leisurely method of work. In him love of the land is strong. A very large part of the workmen expect to return to the country in that golden day when their land is given back to them. That their land would be returned has been the peasants' dream for generations; formerly they believed that their father, the Tsar, would grant its restitution; but the Tsar is no longer the divine figure, a little lower than God, that they long considered him, and they are now beginning to look to the revolution to restore them their inheritance. How strong is this sense of brothership to the land is shown by the custom among factory workers of going back to their village in the spring to help in the farm work, returning to the factories in the autumn when the crops are in. That so many of them regard city work as a makeshift operates against the development of a higher efficiency.

The parties of the revolution range, in their programs, from socialism in moderation to the full socialistic belief. But the workmen, though certainly among the revolutionary forces, are not, in the mass, socialistic. They are but just pushing up through the age-long Russian blackness; they are but freshly and dimly aware that, as human beings, they have the right to higher conditions of living than now are theirs. But as yet they have attained to no scheme of how things should be their ideals do not reach far beyond shorter hours, personal freedom, more comfortable living. They are beginning to waken to the idea that perhaps they have the power to drag themselves up to these better conditions, but they have not yet sufficient confidence in self, sufficient collective energy, to make a large and successful trial. For centuries the Government has closed them off from all development; for centuries the Church has taught that God made them poor and ignorant, and to seek to change their condition was to disobey God's will. Their initiative was never allowed birth; so for new things that they have desired they have looked to their masters-God and the Tsar, rarely to themselves. The enforced inertia of ages, the instinctive dependence on others, are not to be thrown entirely off in one day, even in one generation. But the Russian workman is slowly shaking himself free.

has

The night after I visited the Prokeroff factory, I was given glimpses into the life that exists outside of mills and barracks. My con

ductor was a self-educated leader of workingmen named Polakoff; he had had a score of names before and doubtless has a new one now -a black-haired, black-bearded, black-eyed young fellow, rich-voiced, gentle of manner. He was an "illegal;" that is, a person without a passport. Without a passport, a man can sleep in no Russian hotel; and only a very daring comrade will give him refuge for a night, for a host who lets a friend sleep in his house and does not give advance notice to the police thereby makes himself a criminal. Two years before, my conductor had been guilty of some such heinous matter as talking about a representative government. He had been imprisoned and, of course, his passport was confiscated. He had soon escaped, but since to apply to the police for a new passport would be to walk straight back into prison, he had lived the two years without a passport. During these two years he had literally had not where to lay his head. Hardly ever had he slept two successive nights in the same place; hardly ever had he known in advance whose floor would next give him rest; and often, lacking a place to sleep, he had walked the streets all night. Naturally, one leading so irregular a life, and hunted by the police, could not, and dare not, work steadily; so he was poorly dressed and half starved. His case is not a peculiar one; thousands of Russia's most intelligent, most devoted, citizens live the same cur-of-the-street life.

A WORKINGMAN'S HOME

Polakoff and I drove through the falling snow to the outskirts of Moscow. He led me

through a doorway guarded by a porter in a great sheepskin coat-night and day these porters sit at the entrance of every Russian house to carry to the police news of any suspicious incident or person-into a yard in which houses were clustered about as in a village. We passed through a door into the usual stifling air (from autumn till spring no Russian window is opened), climbed a rough wooden stairway, heads down to avoid the low ceiling, knocked at a door, and went in. I took one gulp of the air, then bolted back into the hall. I leaned against the wall, faint. The air within that room was dead, rotting.

After a space, I re-entered. The room was large and low. One corner was almost filled by a huge, whitewashed brick oven on whose top were two tin tea-kettles and a few dishes;

against opposite walls were two calicocurtained beds; on the floor were two chairs and a table bearing a smoking oil lamp; on the wall were exactly ten brass ikons. Other furniture the rooms had not. And here lived two families, and the last remnant of another. At the table, standing amid a miscellaneous assortment of children that covered floor and beds, a middle-aged woman was ironing, sprinkling the clothes in the Russian fashion by blowing upon each piece a mouthful of water in a fine spray. Beside the table sat a younger woman repadding an oft-patched coat, and a shriveled, bent old figure vaguely fumbling with a needle at a new waist.

"And where do you live?" I asked of the old seamstress.

She crossed to a dark corner that I had not before observed. In it was curtained off, to the height of my shoulder, a space two feet by four. She drew the curtain and I saw, upon a wooden box, a bag of straw and some rags of covering.

"This is my house," she said.

Polakoff explained to me that this was a typical workingman's home; and as I had been in many others just like it I did not doubt his word.

A GLIMPSE OF A TRADES UNION

A quarter of an hour later we plunged into a black court, groped through an angled passage, and came into a little hallway that looked into three dingy rooms lighted by coal-oil lamps. The rooms were furnished alike: three rough benches, a rough table, and over the table the word "OFFICE”—and in each room a trades union meeting was in progress. I gave my attention to the largest meeting. There was just one woman in the room-wearing a shapeless black jacket, the invariable brown shawl tightly about her head. She had a pretty, square face; and she stood in the centre of the room smoking a cigarette in perfect unconcern of everybody. The thirty or forty men, overshoes and overcoats on, sat droopingly on the benches and leaned droopingly against the walls as white and wan a lot of men as I have ever seen. Why they were so, I soon understood. They were delegates from the bakeshops that make the little fancy cakes dearly loved by Russians with their tea. These bakeshops are in cellars, and here, away from light and air, the men work twelve and fourteen hours, and are paid from twenty-five to forty

cents a day. And as were these men, so were the others.

"We can't afford better rooms than these," Polakoff explained; "and we could not get better ones even if we had the money. No landlord of good rooms wants to have the police break down his doors and smash his windows."

I looked from one meeting to the other-at the rooms, low, bare, dirty; at the men, discouraged, patient. So these were typical union meetings of Moscow, Russia's greatest industrial city! I could but wonder how these few exhausted followers of a persecuted faith -the faith that it's a man's right to be a man

could ever hope to break their way through to freedom. But I remembered that, as a movement, they were young; that they are growing in mind; that despite the Government they were growing in strength, even as the suppressed revolutionary feeling is growing stronger and stronger. And I remembered how bitterly stimulating was their condition to organization, to revolt; and when I went away I, too, had hope of their future deliverance.

A SECRET POLITICAL MEETING

Half an hour later, we were sitting in the side room of a workingmen's tea-house. Here Polakoff had engaged to meet that night a little group of men to whom the gospel of liberty had never been preached. The floor was covered with sawdust; the little round tables with cloths, anciently white, now brown with stains; and from one corner the neverabsent ikon bestowed its blessing. About the table sat nine men, all "black," to use the Russian term for unenlightened. Before us were three or four little teapots, brought in by a white-bearded, blue-bloused old man, each holding enough tea for half a dozen very weak and very bad glasses. Each pot, with sugar and unlimited boiling water, cost five kopeks, or two and a half American cents.

For so many men to have gathered in a workman's lodging would have aroused suspicion and meant arrest. So the meeting had been arranged for this public room, open to the street by four windows. It was like conspiracy on a street corner, or in a glass house. After one man had been stationed at the, open doorway to the main room to give warning of the entrance of any suspicious person, Polakoff began his talk in a low whisper. He was under a great strain; and with reason, for everywhere

the polls by the police, but to vote for the men they knew would represent their cause, the cause of all the Russian people. No such mild election speech ever fell from American lips; but Polakoff trembled to be speaking, and they trembled to be listening. For here it was prison speech.

A little later, as we walked away, pushing against the wind like men at wheelbarrows, I asked Polakoff to come with me to supper. It was close upon midnight, and my hunger pained me. I could guess his appetite, for I knew he was practically penniless and had been living on little but tea and bread. He wanted to accept, but he told me he had as yet no place for the night and if he were to find a place he must at once begin search. He hesitated a space between something to eat and shelter and chose the latter. To take him passportless to my hotel for the night would mean his arrest, and probably also mine

so I could but let him walk away alone into the night-hungry, homeless, workless, a thing hunted by the police; devoted, one who

A TYPICAL FACTORY OPERATIVE This man has been arrested for a moderate part in the revolutionary movement, and I was assured that he would undoubtedly be executed

men who dared electioneer for a liberal Duma were being arrested. The men swallowed their boiling tea-a Russian's throat is as callous to heat as a blacksmith's palm-and listened, straining for the appearance of chance-met and unacquainted tea-drinkers. Two or three times the sentry gave a word of warning, my friend's whispered discourse snapped off, and the men devoted themselves to their tea with a nervous oblivion of all else.

Polakoff's talk did not run upon revolution. It was wholly upon the Duma elections, and contained no more violent matter than urging his listeners not to be frightened away from

A PAIR OF WOOD-CHOPPERS

Wood, principally birch, is the great fuel of Russia; so wood-cutters

are very numerous

had given his everything, one still ready to give everything, even life a type of thousands of Russian workingmen who have burst through the ignorance and passivity their Tsars have crushed upon them, into the strange new knowledge that they are men.

RUSSIA'S TREATMENT OF THE INSANE

The next morning was Sunday and the thousand bells of Moscow were booming forth from their domes of blue and gilt, commands to the faithful to come and pray for their Tsar and the safety of his beneficent, God-given power.

The snow of last night had changed to a mixture of sleet and rain, and a frenzied wind from the steppes raged through the streets. I was slipping along the sidewalk, the windflung sleet striking into my face like shivered glass, when suddenly a high hard voice cut to my cars through the deep-toned command of the bells. I recognized one of the melancholy songs, all in a minor key, so characteristic of Russia. I turned about, and in the middle of the street, unmindful of the little sleighs that

"OUT OF WORK"

This unskilled workman said that when in work he made 50 kopeks (25 cents) a day

whizzed about carrying huddled figures deepburied in the comfort of furs, I found the singer. It was a woman, perhaps thirty-five. Russia had made me used to rags, but her rags startled me. Tied beneath her chin, as a kerchief, was