Mustard Seeds of Reform Carried From This Land to the Steppes

By Isabel F. Hapgood

When Russia recently abolished the sale of liquor, first in the shops
run as a Government monopoly, and, after a brief experience of the
beneficent results, in the restaurants and clubs as well, an astonished
and admiring world recognized the measure as one of the greatest events
in the moral history of a nation. It takes rank with the reforms of
Peter the Great. It almost casts into the shade the emancipation of the
serfs.

There has always existed in Russia a strong party which severely
disapproved of Peter precisely because he forced "Western" ideas upon
them. Their idea has always been that Russia would have developed a far
higher degree of genuine culture and far more precious spiritual
qualities had she been left to the promptings of her own genius and its
"healthy, natural" development. And there are, indubitably, persons
scattered through the vast Russian Empire who entertain parallel
opinions with regard to the total prohibition of liquor just effected,
and with regard to the projected change in the calendar now assumed to
be imminent. I trust that I shall not increase their numbers to
dangerous proportions if I call attention to the fact that these reforms
have also, like Peter the Great's ideas, been imported from the
West--from the Far West, the United States. I am sure my
fellow-countrymen will be gratified to learn the truth, and I cheerfully
accept the risk, and assume that Russia will, in all probability, remain
ignorant of my interference!

It is true that we do not have actual, effective prohibition anywhere
here in America, and that we do not seem to be within measurable
distance of such an achievement; that Russia has distanced us again in
this, just as she distanced us by emancipating her serfs, without a
war, before we emancipated our slaves, with the aid of a war. But we
have supplied the scriptural mustard seed in the case of prohibition in
Russia, and have either furnished the seed for the change in the
calendar, or, at any rate, have provided elements that have hastened its
growth to a very remarkable degree.

Mustard seed No. 1 was carried over from the United States in the Autumn
of 1887 and sown on the good ground of the late Count Tolstoy, and other
noble men, whence--as results show--it spread abroad with a swiftness
suggestive rather of the proverbial weed than of the fair flower its
blossoming h