In the first place, what is the “Intelligenzia”? Properly speaking, it is composed of every one who can read or write. But the term is generally used to designate those members of the middle class who belong to the professional classes—doctors, professors, teachers, journalists, and literary men. In its largest sense it is the whole middle class, from which nine-tenths of the officials are drawn. But when Russians speak of it they generally mean the middle class, excluding officials. Such as it is, it contains, as well as the most hot-headed revolutionaries and violent youths, all that is best and most intelligent and cultivated in Russia, all men of science who have done remarkable work in various branches, all doctors, whose life in the country is a life of difficulty and self-sacrifice which it would be difficult to exaggerate, all the professors and the teachers, the actors, the singers, the musicians, the artists, the writers. These people have for years been the absolute prey of the irresponsibility and blundering stupidity of the higher bureaucrats. They have with difficulty been able to obtain foreign books (Matthew Arnold’s “Essays on Criticism” was one of the books on the index two years ago); in teaching, half the facts of history have been forbidden them; and at the slightest suspicion of not being “well-intentioned” they have been placed under police surveillance and often been subjected to gross indignities. Is it to be wondered at that they are bitter now? The average man and woman of the Russian middle class is incomparably better educated than the average English man or woman of the same class. They are saturated with the foreign classics. They often speak two languages besides Russian; and they are conversant with modern thought in the various European countries as far as it is allowed to reach them. When one sees the average Englishman abroad one is aghast at his ignorance and his want of education in comparison with these people. I have constantly, both here and in Manchuria, found to my shame that I knew nothing of English history in comparison with the Russians I met. The reason is very simple: they are taught at school things which will be useful to them. Every one is given a general foundation of knowledge. I do not believe the average Englishman to be more stupid than the average foreigner, but he is not educated. A man may go through a public school and even a university in England and come out at the end ludicrously ignorant of everything except the classical books he was obliged to “get up,” and at our public schools, with a few brilliant exceptions, the education of the average boy amounts to this: that he does not learn Latin and Greek, and he certainly learns nothing else. I never heard English history mentioned at Eton, and all the English history I know I learnt in the nursery. The average Russian boy knows far more about English history than the average English boy, let alone European