an the
attempted revolution of 1905. For beneath her soil lie explosive materials
more deadly than any dynamite manufactured by _intelligentsia_. Her mineral
wealth, at present almost untouched, is incalculable in quantity and
amazing in variety. When her mines are opened up Russia will become,
according to the judgment of Dr. Kennard, editor of _The Russian
Year-Book,_ "without a doubt the richest Empire the world has ever seen."
Attracted by her vast mining possibilities, by her enormous virgin forests,
by her practically unlimited capacity for grain-production, the capital
of Europe is knocking at the doors of Russia. Factories are rising, mines
being started all over the country. Russia is about to be exploited by
European business enterprise, just as America and Africa have been. The
world has need of her raw materials, and is only interested in her people
as potential cheap labour. Thus within the last few years something
analogous to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Europe has come into
existence in Russia. We may catch a glimpse of what these new classes are
like from a recent book by Mr. Stephen Graham, called _Changing Russia_. He
writes:

"The Russian bourgeois is of this sort; he wants to know the price of
everything. Of things which are independent of price he knows nothing,
or, if he knows of them, he sneers at them and hates them. Talk to him of
religion, and show that you believe the mystery of Christ; talk to him
of life, and show that you believe in love and happiness; talk to him of
woman, and show that you understand anything about her unsexually; talk
to him of work, and show that though you are poor you have no regard for
money--and the bourgeois is uneasy.... Instead of opera, the gramophone;
instead of the theatre, the kinematograph; instead of national literature,
the cheap translation; instead of national life, a miserable imitation of
modern English life.... It may be thought that there is little harm in the
commercialisation of the Russian, the secularising of his life; and that
after all the bourgeois population of England, France, and Germany is not
so bad as not to be on the way to something better. But that would be a
mistake; if once the Russian nation becomes thoroughly perverted, it will
be the most treacherous, most vile, most dangerous in Europe. For the
perverted Russian all is possible; it is indeed his favourite maxim,
borrowed, he thinks, from Nietzsche, that 'all is permitt