The strike is over, although I believe some revolutionaries are still holding out in a factory near the Zoological Gardens. The shops are open, the electric light is shining on the hard, snowy, ice-cold streets, and life is going on, in the Russian expression, in its old rut. I suppose the first question which will present itself to people abroad anxious for information is: What did it all amount to? The second question: What is the result of it? The third is possibly: What do the people in Moscow, the inhabitant, the man in the street, think of it? Practically, it did not amount to very much; a general strike was proclaimed which was to take place all over Russia with the object of obtaining universal suffrage. The strike was not universal. It was closely followed by an armed rising of the revolutionary party in Moscow with the object of arresting the Governor-General and establishing a temporary Government. It resulted in complete and utter failure; and this seems to point to one of two things: either that the revolutionary party is less well organised than we supposed it to be, or that it wrongly gauged popular feeling and no longer found such strong support in public opinion as it did before. If it be judged by its recent action it cannot be said to have given proof of any good organisation, since it was obviously a mistake to foment a movement among the military—using economic needs and demands as a weapon—a week before the strike began. The economic demands were made by the soldiers, and satisfied immediately, and their mutiny ceased. It is nonsense to pretend that the soldiers have any revolutionary tendencies, and the revolutionaries made a great mistake in trying to undermine their belief in the Emperor. The same thing holds good as regards the peasants; and only yesterday a person with ultra-Radical convictions said to me: “The peasant, if he is hungry, can easily be made to loot and burn; but if he is replete he will send anybody who talks politics to him to the devil, and if any one attacks the Emperor before him he will tear him to pieces; possibly in twenty or thirty years things will be different and he will be an enlightened man; at present he is not, and there is no use in not facing the fact. The revolutionaries have made a cardinal error in attacking the peasants’ and the soldiers’ only ideal—call it ideal, idol, or what you like.” Therefore I say that in this case the behaviour of the revolutionaries showed neither insight nor statesmanship nor good organisation. It is possible, of course, that the strike may have been brought about, as I wrote before, by the workmen forcing the leaders’ hands, being unwilling to starve for a month but ready to rise in arms and fight for several days.