and not to be suspected of belonging to that immediately beneath your own. Hence England is the paradise of snobbery, social and intellectual. There is a mad race to be ‘in the swim’ socially and ‘in the know’ intellectually, and to read the right books and admire the right pictures. As to equality I will give you a concrete instance. Let two men get drunk in London, one a rich man and the other a poor man. If they make a disturbance and get taken up, the rich man, by taking a little trouble, will get the matter hushed up. The poor man will not get off. You will say that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor in every country. But I say that here in Russia nobody cares if you go drunk in the street, and that, whether you are rich or poor, if you do so the same thing will happen to you; you will be taken to the _uchastok_ and kept there till you get sober. Whereas in England they care very much; you have to appear before a magistrate—but the rich man will get out of this. As to fraternity, the English hedge themselves round with every kind of social prejudice and barrier they can devise. Their clubs are like their prisons, places where it is forbidden to speak to your neighbour, except under special circumstances, and where you have to wear a special costume. A Russian convict enjoys a greater freedom of social intercourse than an English shopman. I judge from their books. Read ‘Kipps,’ by H. G. Wells. It is a record of leaden social tyranny.” “What you call convention,” said the professor, “is merely the maintenance of order. It may be exaggerated, but an exaggeration in this sense is preferable to one in the other. You can sup here at a restaurant all night, but a man may shoot you for not being brisk enough in your manifestation of loyalty.” “Many Englishmen would gladly shoot Mr. Bernard Shaw for the same offence,” said the landlord, “but they have not the courage of their convictions.” “What you call freedom,” said the professor, “is precisely the opposite of freedom. It is lawlessness. Your neighbour can kill you with impunity. Where does your freedom come in the matter? What freedom is there in not being allowed to read a foreign newspaper unless it is expurgated, or in being sent to Siberia for disapproving of the methods of Government officials?” “The people who were sent to Siberia,” said the landlord, “were those who wished to overturn the existing form of government, under which the ordinary individual enjoyed peculiar liberty. And even here how mildly the Government acted! Really remarkable agitators like Tolstoi were left alone. The English acted more drastically, and hounded Byron and Shelley from the country. But when it is a question of expressing their convictions they would never throw a bomb; they cannot go further than throwing a herring at Mr. Balfour. The fact is that the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and they have the shopkeeper’s aversion from a mess in the shop.”