and that they were arrived at gradually and--it may be
added--with considerable reluctance, since they had, as it were, to win
their way through a number of my own personal sympathies and political
prejudices. There is, of course, no room here for any detailed treatment of
a movement upon which a big book might be written, and I shall therefore
have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must
ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited
experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian
revolution.

The main reason why English people get mistaken ideas about Russia is that
they imagine Russians to be nothing but Englishmen picturesquely disguised
in furs and top-boots, and because they interpret the political situation
in Russia in terms of English history and politics. As I have already tried
to show, Russians are built differently from English people, _from the soul
outwards_, while the political and social condition of the Russian Empire
is totally unlike anything that has ever existed in this country. If
therefore the real causes of the movement of 1905 and of its failure are to
be rightly understood, we must put away from our minds the desire to find
analogies in the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, or the French
Revolution of 1789, or the social revolution of which Karl Marx dreamed;
Russia can only be interpreted in terms of Russian history and Russian
conditions. In one thing, however, the Russian revolution was like all
revolutions which have ever been or are ever likely to be, viz. that it was
concerned with two distinct issues, one a narrow question of political and
constitutional reform, and the other a far wider question involving an
attempt to reconstruct not merely the institutions of society but also to
transform the ideals and conceptions upon which society rested.

Let us first of all consider the narrower political issue. This was simple
enough; the outbreak of 1905 had as its primary object the setting up of
some form of representative government which would control the bureaucratic
machine. It has been already pointed out that the constitution of modern
Russia was largely due to the genius of Peter the Great. During the
nineteenth century, however, it became apparent to thinking Russians that
the constitution, for the sake both of stability and efficiency, needed
development in the direction of popular representation. The plea of