One of the gravest factors of the general situation is that Eastern Siberia seems to be entirely in the hands of the revolutionaries, who are apparently managing the railway and everything else with perfect order, while the troops, anxious only to get home, are taking any engines they can lay hands on and racing back, one train literally racing another! Altogether it cannot be said that the outlook is particularly cheerful. There is one bright point so far, and that is that all parties seem anxious to convoke the Duma. The Liberals want it, the Conservatives want it, the Extreme Radicals sanction the elections. The Radicals say it will be packed by the Government; but I do not see how this is possible. They say they will let it meet, and that if it proves “a Black Hundred Duma” they will destroy it. They call everything which is not Radical “Black Hundred.” But, as I have said before, and as I cannot tire of saying, it is useless to blame these extreme parties for talking nonsense. They have been driven to this nonsense by the still greater want of sense on the part of the Government of Russia during the last twenty years, and in wanting to wipe out this system altogether they are, after all, in the right. Unfair they may be, hysterical, and absurd. So were the Jacobins; but the absurdity, extravagance, and violence of the Jacobins were only the logical result of the “Ancien Régime.” So it is here, although it is misleading to compare the present movement in Russia with the French Revolution. And behind all the rumours and conflicts of various parties looms the agrarian question; the ninety million peasants who till the land in the same manner in which they tilled it four hundred years ago; whose land from generation to generation dwindles by partition, while the population increases. How and when is this question going to be solved? It can only be solved by the education of the peasants themselves; but the question is what can be done to gain time and to make this education possible. My outlook is, perhaps, too pessimistic. I do not know. I only feel that the whole revolutionary movement is beyond all forces of control, and that no measures in the world can put it back now; whether it could by wisdom be led into safe channels is another question. Such a thing has seldom been seen in the history of the world, and it is, after all, only out of the past that we make the future. To get rid of these gloomy ideas I went to the hospital, where New Year’s Day was celebrated with great gusto; there was a Christmas-tree, dancing and song, and it was delightful to see a little tiny boy and a huge soldier dancing opposite each other. The Russian peasants dance to each other, and separately, of course, like Highlanders when they dance a reel or a schottische. It was gay and yet rather melancholy; there were so many cripples, and it reminded me a little of the Christmas feast described in Dostoievski’s “Letters from a Dead House.”