These men thought that they had helped to bring on a political revolution. They little knew their Russia. There was just one man of ability in that first ministry who knew the truth, and he knew only part of it. Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, the socialist who was appointed Minister of Justice, knew that what the world was about to witness in Russia was a social revolution. But he, too, was blind to the task before him. At the very outset of his career as Minister of Justice, Kerensky insisted on abolishing the death penalty. “I do not wish that this shall be a bloody revolution,” he declared. In one sentence he showed how little he, too, knew his Russia. There was some excuse for ignorance on the part of most of the other ministers. Prince Lvoff, for example, was a large estate owner, a man who lived in the country a great deal of the time, one who had been active in the affairs of his zemstvo or county council, a friend and adviser of peasants, but always the great gentleman, the aristocrat. Miliukoff was a university professor, a man of books, an amateur of music. And so on through the list. But Kerensky was no aristocrat. He was an obscure lawyer, one who specialized in cases of men and women accused of political offenses. He defended with fiery zeal young students whose revolutionary activities drew them within the tiger claws of the autocracy. He was the friend of the poor. He was one of the executive council of the Social Revolutionary party, largely made up of peasants. Why did he not know and understand his countrymen? Why could he not have known that the abolishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme crisis would drench the revolution in blood? Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme idealist, a preacher, a prophet. He changed a great deal between February and November, 1917. But events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme idealist, a dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and women are never really great as leaders. They can stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to the highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do monumental things for a time. But the dreamer’s usefulness stops there. Somewhere in Russia, in one of the universities perhaps, in some farmhouse or on some lonely steppe, there lives a big, hard-fisted strong-brained ruthless boy who can and will some day do the kind of ruling and guiding Kerensky talks about and would have enforced if he could. Perhaps that boy got his inspiration from hearing Kerensky talk. But the boy is a real leader. He will stretch out his hand to the mob and the mob will obey his indomitable will.