Most of the grand dukes and grand duchesses are virtually prisoners on their estates. The Empress Dowager is confined to her estate in the Crimea, and the government would not even allow her to leave it to bid her exiled son good-by. But Michael Alexandrovitch must have convinced the government that he is trustworthy, and he seems to be regarded as a man who could be brought out of his shadowy background and set up for the people to call a king, if the worst comes to the worst and they have to have a king. This is the most severe form the reaction could permanently take in Russia, as far as I can judge. Of course a military dictatorship may precede this, but the dictatorship would be a temporary thing, a war measure to crush the Bolsheviki and bring order out of chaos. Nobody in Russia, as far as I know and believe, wants a counter revolution in the sense suggested by the Bolsheviki. But the counter revolution, as a bogie to be held over the heads of the timid dreamers and of those half-hearted ones who shrink from bloodshed, is so useful that the Bolshevik leaders worked it hard all summer and in the latest developments they were still at it. The experience of the French people after their revolution is often cited by the timorous in Russia. It is true that the Bourbons came back, but the people of France did not call them back. They were put back by the allied monarchs of Europe, aghast at the spread of republicanism in the eastern hemisphere. Following the revolution and the two score years of Napoleonic wars, these rulers got together, signed a secret agreement that the peace of Europe depended on France remaining a monarchy, and in 1814 they put Louis XVIII on the throne. By virtue of giving the French a liberal constitution he kept the throne until his death, ten years later. The allied monarchs saw to it that his brother, Charles X, succeeded him, but the allies could not prevent the French from turning him out of the country within six years. Nor could they stay the revolution of 1848 which banished Louis Philippe, the last Bourbon. Times have changed since the French revolution. Kings have lost most of their power and almost all of their popularity. They cannot get together and, under the direction of a Metternich, agree that the peace of Europe demands that Russia remain an autocracy. They could not do this even if the old combination, Russia, Prussia, Austria, England and France, had not been violently disrupted. No country in Europe is interested in restoring the Romanoff dynasty, unless it be the country of the Hohenzollerns, and that country is not going to have much to say about the world’s business for the next few years.