eals so much of Russian contemporary history. Our
sources are confined to the untrustworthy statements of a censored press
and travelers' tales.

But it is common knowledge that the Bolshevist dictator requisitioned
and "nationalized" the banks, took factories, workshops, and plants from
their owners and handed them over to the workmen, deprived landed
proprietors of their estates, and allowed peasants to appropriate them.
It is in the matter of industry, however, that his experiment is most
interesting as showing the practical value of Marxism as a policy and
the ability of the Bolsheviki to deal with delicate social problems. The
historic decree issued by the Moscow government on the nationalization
of industry after the opening experiment had broken down contains data
enough to enable one to affirm that Lenin himself judged Marxism
inapplicable even to Russia, and left it where he had found it--among
the ideals of a millennial future. That ukase ordered the gradual
nationalization of all private industries with a capital of not less
than one million rubles, but allowed the owners to enjoy the gratuitous
usufruct of the concern, provided that they financed and carried it on
as before. Consequently, although in theory the business was transferred
to the state, in reality the capitalist retained his place and his
profits as under the old system. Consequently, the principal aims of
socialism, which are the distribution of the proceeds of industry among
the community and the retention of a certain surplus by the state, were
missed. In the Bolshevist procedure the state is wholly eliminated
except for the purpose of upholding a fiction. It receives nothing from
the capitalist, not even a royalty.

The Slav is a dreamer whose sense of the real is often defective. He
loses himself in vague generalities and pithless abstractions. Thus,
before opening a school he will spin out a theory of universal
education, and then bemoan his lack of resources to realize it. True,
many of the chiefs of the sect--for it is undoubtedly a sect when it is
not a criminal conspiracy, and very often it is both--were not Slavs,
but Jews, who, for the behoof of their kindred, dropped their Semitic
names and adopted sonorous Slav substitutes. But they were most
unscrupulous peculators, incapable of taking an interest in the
scientific aspect of such matters, and hypnotized by the dreams of lucre
which the opportunity evoked. One has only to call to