he might go during the Presidential contest. Born in Virginia, a life-long resident of Maryland, sprung, on both the paternal and maternal side, from family stocks noted for intellectual superiority and public usefulness, he would stand out from our National background as few nominees to the Presidency have done. An Episcopalian, but as popular with Catholic and Jew in Maryland as with Protestant, noteworthy for his just treatment of the Negro in educational and other respects, his nomination would, in itself, be a silent rebuke to sectarian bigotry and racial bitterness. Endowed with fine powers as a writer and speaker, his thoughts and purposes as a candidate would be set forth with a degree of effective clearness that would leave little to be desired. An earnest advocate of the restoration of liquor control, subject to the limitations of the Eighteenth Amendment, to the several States, he would bring to the Democratic standard far more than enough Republicans, disgusted with the lawlessness, political corruption and bloodshed begotten by National Prohibition, to offset any Prohibitionist defection in the Democratic ranks. The foremost protagonist of the Democracy of Jefferson and Cleveland, his election would be a home-coming event of extraordinary significance in a party sense. The holder of a responsible post, under the Wilson Administration, during the World War, and a loyal adherent of Woodrow Wilson himself, he would make an especially strong appeal to all those Democrats who hold the name of that great man in reverence. Sane, firmly poised, without an eccentric streak in his character, sharing all the conservative attributes of the people of Maryland, a State in which there are many wealthy men and not a few vast industries, but no "malefactors of great wealth", the business interests of the country could confidently look to him for sound policies of finance and taxation. Irreproachably faithful, throughout his entire political career, to the general popular welfare, "equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever State or persuasion, religious or political," would be his watchword as it was that of the great Democratic leaders in times past.

To sum up, Governor Ritchie would be a President worthy, in every respect, to fill the exalted office which has exercised such a powerful influence in shaping our destinies as a people.

THE DIVIDED HOUSE OF RUSSIA

BY COUNT SFORZA

IN Russia, the least important thing is the Government. The really essential factors are the workmen and the peasants. It is with them that one has to reckon, much more than with the Kremlin. But dictatorial governments always excite some curiosity, be they exercised by a small clique or by a single demagogic individual. We may then well examine what is now the Russian Government and what it stands for.

I

When one has enough mental serenity not to be biased by mere appearances and theoretical formulas, he can see that the present régime is simply a copy and continuation of the Czarist rule, with a little more disorder, comprehensible after such an upheaval. The present régime, which is not in the least to be confounded with Lenin's epoch, is controlled by a group whose chief is Mr. Stalin, a Georgian. The most important among his colleagues are Mr. Rykow and Mr. Bukarin. These gentlemen probably believe themselves to be most sincere Bolsheviki; but they are without the terrible gift of fixed ideas which made the real force of a Lenin or of a Trotzky. They are shrewd people. They believe that the Revolution has to be defended by an iron discipline imposing silence upon all members of their party and making them obey their chiefs perinde ac cadaver, as probably they would like to say, if they knew the rules that Loyola dictated for his Jesuits. Only they believe also, probably in good faith, that the Revolution consists essentially in the permanence of their very persons at the Kremlin.

No elections, not even inside the assemblies of the party, although it constitutes the smallest possible minority of the Russian people; no freedom of the press; no criticisms are allowed during the rare meetings of the party. Everything is

ruled by a small class of bureaucrats and of party officials, all selected from above, by Mr. Stalin himself, or in Mr. Stalin's name. Anybody who, having known a little of old imperial Russia, goes there again now, finds the same atmosphere of bureaucratic tyranny, of espionage, of fear of mental suffocation, in a word.

But political passions, be they conservative or revolutionary, have rendered it so difficult to bear a serene judgment on the Russian situation, or to believe that a judgment is really serene, that it is better to let the Bolsheviki speak for themselves, which they rarely do.

Only a few months ago one of them dared to say at the Communist Federal Congress: "Among those who govern, many believe, and nothing has yet disillusioned them, that they are above all existing law, that they will never be punished, whatever they do."

Mr. Kalinin himself, although he belongs to the present all powerful group, went so far, a few months ago, as to write: "In old Russia there was no legal status for the masses; the nobles and the capitalists were always sure not to be punished; the officials were the tyrants of their subordinates. This continued for centuries. The national idea of justice came out in the end, breaking a world where the strong were always right and the feeble were always wrong. It is only too natural that the respect of the laws and of justice is not yet rooted in the people's hearts. The new law was there: but life still went on as before. We must confess that we have made no serious progress since Czarist times."

No doubt, there is something in Mr. Kalinin's excuses and defenses. All the same, they constitute a poorly veiled acknowledgment of the failure of ten years of Bolshevik rule.

The old imperial bureaucracy, corrupt and cumbersome as it frequently was, possessed a sort of moral force, the natural outcome of routine and tradition; always slow though it was, it happened sometimes to be honest and intellectual when represented by some rare but highly respectable types of the Russian intelligencia. Yet no boasts of perfection came out of the ranks of the ancient officials, but rather the contrary. The young

Communist bureaucracy, however, is always putting on pretentious and busy airs; with a conceited smile it is always shouting that a new world is about to come out of its ideas. In reality, as soon as the new comers are confronted with any difficulty, they hide badly-behind a mask of Napoleonic decision-the most childish incapacity and uncertainty. The fact that the new régime pretends and proclaims to be constantly infallible makes the effect of incompetence and ignorance so much the

worse.

An official of the imperial epoch remained for years in the same employ and in the same town; even if incompetent, he ended sometimes by acquiring some sort of rough businesslike practice. The pretentious young agents from the Soviet Kremlin are not allowed to be laughed at; they may only be hated or feared. As soon as the grumbling and complaints from villages and towns grow to the point of disregarding the fear of governmental displeasure, and threaten to become a source of wider scandal, an immediate change of place and employment is ordered from Moscow. Frequently the change takes the form of a promotion, because the Soviet agents cannot be wrong. Through the whole extent of Russia, from the Pacific province to the Polish frontier, there is an eternal movement of officials in search of virgin places in which to show their talents.

So, through lack of men, through lack of courage and of free discussion, through lack of a sufficiently long and conscious evolution in the masses, the great dream Lenin dreamed, when he transplanted the Russian Government from Petrograd to Moscow, has been shattered. The fall is even worse than it would have been if anarchy had come. Anarchy, indeed, is an essentially provisional condition, out of which something new must come. The new Russian Government has simply sunk to the worst forms and traditions of that Czarist bureaucracy which Lenin felt sure he could replace by a more living and efficient Russia.

How could it have been otherwise, when the two régimes had in common the same hate and mistrust for individual freedom and for any fecund open struggle of ideas; for all that, in a word, which alone makes social life worth the living?

II

What are the relations between the masses of Russian workmen and the Soviet Government?

The Russian workmen constitute a maximum of fifteen millions in a total of one hundred and thirty million Russians, the remainder practically now all peasants. The Communist party, which had no more than thirty thousand members when, in 1917, it succeeded in seizing the power, has grown to 800,000 members. Indeed it might have increased to millions, when one thinks that, in Russia, it is only by the fact of being a member of the Communist party that one may have a complete sense of personal safety. They are, in the party, still under one million, not because of lack of applications for membership, but out of traditional respect for Lenin's formula prescribing "quality, not quantity". Be the quality good or bad in a Communistic sense, the fact is that admissions into the Party are still relatively slow. Of the 800,000 members of the Communist Party, only about 350,000 are workmen or ex-workmen, the other 450,000 being ex-bourgeois, assumed workmen and, in the lowest proportion, peasants.

There are books and newspapers in Europe and America that describe the privations and sufferings of the Russian workmen. The description is exact, the coloring is not overdone; all the same a polemical aim soon appears to the eyes of the few who know, when not a word is found about the real moral feeling of these workmen a feeling which is still, in spite of privations and sufferings, a sort of religious unshaken faith in Communism. We may add, in parenthesis, that, by voluntary omissions of this kind, those writings often reach an effect contrary to their aims, by provoking, even in the spirit of some anti-Bolshevik but free Russian spirits, a sense of mental and moral dislike for the Western methods of polemical campaign against Communism. When, voluntarily or not, one disregards certain psychological sides of the race, nothing is to be understood in Russia.

Let us state the truth as it is.

The Russian workmen deeply believe-or, to be more cautious, till now they still believe, in spite of a series of deceitful years