How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked, _repente turpissimus_, suddenly says, some fine morning, "Evil, be thou my good." In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may only be some propagandist lie--all we are suffered to hear about some early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the plain working-man of all countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage, right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man emerges a Satanist. II To-day the convert does not insist upon bearing the new name. He does not, except in the case of a few doctrinaire bigots, repeat any Satanist creed. But in several portions of Europe the war made conversions abound. Imagine the state of mind that it must have induced in many a plain Russian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the Bohemian. First the Tsar, in the name of God and of Holy Russia, sent him, perhaps without so much as a rifle, to starve and be shelled in a trench. If he escaped, the Soviet chiefs, in the name of Justice, sent him to fight against those for whom the Tsar had made him fight before, while his wife and babies were starved by those whom he fought both for and against. When his fighting was done he was made, in the name of social right, an industrial conscript or wage-slave. If alive, to-day, he is probably overworked and starved, perhaps far from home, his family life broken up, his instinct or right of self-direction ignored or punished as treason by rulers whom he did not choose, his whole country in danger of lapsing into the abject miseries of an uncared-for fowl-run--all brought about in the name of human freedom.