cratic faith and zeal in order that it might "carry on."
It is not just to judge the rules without considering the conditions which
called them forth.

Certainly the Provisional Government--which the government of the United
States formally recognized on March 22d, being followed in this by the
other Allied governments next day--could not be accused fairly of being
either slothful or unfaithful. Its accomplishments during those first weeks
were most remarkable. Nevertheless, as the days went by it became evident
that it could not hope to satisfy the masses and that, therefore, it could
not last very long.

III

The Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates was pursuing its
independent existence, under the leadership of Tchcheidze, Skobelev,
Tseretelli, and other moderate Social Democrats. As yet the Bolsheviki were
a very small and uninfluential faction, lacking capable leadership. There
can be very little doubt that the Council represented the feelings of the
great mass of the organized wage-earners far more satisfactorily than the
Provisional Government did, or that it was trusted to a far greater degree,
alike by the wage-earners of the cities and the peasants. A great
psychological fact existed, a fact which the Provisional Government and the
governments of the Allied nations might well have reckoned with: the
Russian working-people, artisans and peasants alike, were aggressively
class conscious and could trust fully only the leaders of their own class.

The majority of the Social Democratic party was, at the beginning, so far
from anything like Bolshevism, so thoroughly constructive and opportunistic
in its policies, that its official organ, _Pravda_--not yet captured by the
Bolsheviki--put forward a program which might easily have been made the
basis for an effective coalition. It was in some respects disappointingly
moderate: like the program of the Provisional Government, it left the land
question untouched, except in so far as the clause demanding the
confiscation of the property of the royal family and the Church bore upon
it. The Social Democratic party, reflecting the interests of the city
proletariat, had never been enthusiastic about the peasants' claim for
distribution of the land, and there had been much controversy between its
leaders and the leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, the party of
the peasants. The program as printed in Pravda read:

1. A biennial one-house parliament.