their socialistic ideas have been echoes from Western
Europe. I remember being told, when I first went to Petrograd, "We
usually have your bad weather here about eight or ten days after you,
only we have it worse." It would seem that the rule holds good in other
ways also, for Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace tells us, in one of his
three deeply interesting chapters on social difficulties in Russia, that
during the last two centuries all the important intellectual movements
in Western Europe have been reflected in Russia, and that these
reflections have generally been what may fairly be called exaggerated
and distorted reflections of the earlier socialistic movements of the
West, but with local peculiarities and local colouring which deserve
attention.

He goes on to explain how the educated classes, absorbing these ideas
from abroad, just as ideas, and not as relating to the conditions of
life in Russia as closely as in England, France, and Germany, from which
they came, have quite naturally been less practical in the conclusions
they have drawn from them, if indeed they have pushed their ideas to any
conclusion at all. We are shown plainly by this lucid and well-informed
writer how natural it has been for Western Socialists to be constructive
and definite in their aims, while Russians could only be destructive.
Nihilism is made clear, and we understand its origin, while we can
equally well understand what we are so reassuringly told about its
present decline. This does not imply necessarily that Russian thinkers
and workers are becoming less socialistic in sympathy and aims, but more
practical; and that they are learning, just as the West has taught them,
that the only way in which they can hope to advance their own views is
to use all the legal means which their government, as it becomes ever
more democratic and constitutional, will increasingly give them.

But amongst all the different classes who may be called educated, the
university students of both sexes form the class which most claims our
sympathies, and constitutes, I consider, Russia's gravest problem. There
are ten universities in the empire, only one of which contains less than
1,300 students, while the leading ones far exceed this number--Moscow
having just under 10,000, and Petrograd about 8,500. We can hardly
realize what such numbers mean for the national life, when over 40,000
men and women are receiving university education and being prepared for
profes