ed,' and by 'all'
he means all abomination, all fearful and unheard-of bestiality, all
cruelty, all falsity, all debauch.... Selfish as it is possible to be,
crass, heavy, ugly, unfaithful in marriage, unclean, impure, incapable
apparently of understanding the good and the true in their neighbours and
in life--such is the Russian bourgeois."

Mr. Graham's picture of the new proletariat in the Ural mines is an equally
horrible one:

"Gold mining is a sort of rape and incest, a crime by which earth and man
are made viler. If I had doubted of its influence on man I needed but to
go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating
population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was
a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauchery....
The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and
squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand
pounds, it is rather difficult to know how to spend it. His ideal of
happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him
lies in that.... Mias is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand
inhabitants. It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka
shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and
women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone. It is situated in a
most lovely hollow among the hills, and, seen from the distance, it is one
of the most beautiful villages of North Russia; but seen from within, it is
a veritable inferno."

Mr. Graham writes as a poet rather than as an economist or a sociologist,
but there is no doubt a grave danger to Russia in a sudden adoption of
industrial life.

_Intelligentsia_, bourgeoisie, and proletariate are all products of the
same forces, all belong to the same family; they are westernised Russians;
they have passed from the fourteenth to the twentieth century at one
stride, and the violent transition has cut them completely adrift from
tradition and from all moral and religious standards; books, commerce,
and industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilisation, have
not civilised such Russians, they have _de-civilised_ them. But, as yet,
Russians of this character form only a tiny fraction of the nation; and
there are happily signs that the dangers of an exotic culture are being
realised even by the _intelligentsia_ themselves. Since the failure of the
revolution there has been a r