is as far removed from what I feel as the diametrically opposed view of the English Liberal Press. I do not regard the existing struggle as being one between aristocratic and democratic principles. It is the struggle between one half of the middle class, the Mandarins, with the Government and the higher Mandarins at their head, and the other half, the professors, the doctors, the lawyers. Above this struggle the aristocracy floats as a nebulous mist, like the gods when they returned to the Twilight of Valhalla, and beneath it the proletariate and the peasantry have been roused from their slumbers by the noise of the fight. My point of view is very simple. I believe, as a statesman once said, that the Russian Government is an autocracy tempered by assassination. I hope that the professors will, with the help of the peasantry and the proletariate, create a big enough disturbance to destroy the existing Government and prepare the way for a real autocracy. Then, and not until then, I shall cry ‘Vive la réaction!’ According to you I ought to die fighting for my higher Mandarins; but you admit it is only a question of one’s passions; well, my passions are turned against them. I hate them. Of course I would have fought for Louis XVIII. or Charles II.; but I should have drawn the line at Charles X., and I should have been rewarded by the result of the subsequent revolution.” “I don’t think you either of you realise,” said the man who belonged to no Party, “that just as the battle of Valmy (which didn’t seem very important to contemporaries except to Goethe, who realised what had happened in a flash) was the beginning of a new age, so was the universal strike here in October last the beginning of another. I think all your talk about autocrats, &c., is amusing, but so very old-fashioned. I don’t think there will ever be such things—again.” “But there are such things,” said the ex-official. “Mr. Balfour ruled England far more despotically than the most unlimited autocrat.”