the Russian character. Mr. Stephen Graham, who was, I believe,
at one time a clerk in a London office, found our civilisation so
intolerable that one day he flung it off and escaped to Russia, where he
has lived as a peasant tramp for many years. To revolutionaries who met him
and expressed their astonishment that an Englishman should choose Russia of
all places to live in, he replied, "I came to Russia because it is the only
free country left in the world." There is, in truth, much to be said for
this startling remark. In no country on earth is there such unaffected
good-will, such open hospitality, such an instinctive respect for personal
liberty--liberty of thought and of manners--such tolerance for the
frailties of human nature, such an abundance of what the great Russian
novelist Dostoieffsky called "all-humanness" and St. Paul called "charity,"
as in Russia. All this, of course, did not come about as a result of
the bureaucratic system; it springs like that system itself from the
fundamentally democratic spirit of the Russian people.

Sec.2. _Religion_.--The last paragraph will read strangely to those people
whose only ideas about Russia are gleaned from newspaper accounts of
the revolution of 1905. We shall come back to the revolution and its
significance later; but meanwhile we must notice another very striking fact
about Russian life--its all-pervading religious atmosphere. Russia is a
land of peasants. In England and Wales 78 per cent of the population live
in towns and the remaining 22 per cent in the country; in Russia something
like 87 per cent live in the country as against 13 per cent in the towns.
These figures are enough to show where the real centre of gravity of the
Russian nation lies. The peasant, or _moujik_, is a primitive and generally
an entirely illiterate person, but he possesses qualities which his more
sophisticated brothers in the West may well envy and admire, a profound
common-sense, a grand simplicity of life and outlook, and an unshakable
faith in the unseen world.

The interior of Russia is almost wholly unknown in the West; until a few
years back it was as much of a _terra incognita_ as Central Africa. But the
revolution led English writers and journalists to explore it, and when the
dust and smoke of that upheaval, which had obscured the truth from the eyes
of Europe, passed away, an astonished world perceived the real Russia for
the first time. "Russia," writes Mr. Stephen Graham,