The government was so afraid of losing the support of the mob that it permitted the country to be overrun by German agents posing as socialists. These agents spent fortunes in the separate peace propaganda alone. They demoralized the army, corrupted the workers in field and factories, and put machine guns in the hands of fanatical dreamers, sending them out into the streets to murder their own friends and neighbors. Every one knew who these men were, but the mob liked their “line of talk” and the government was afraid to touch them. After one of the last occasions when, at their behest, the Bolsheviki went out and shot up Petrograd, Lenine, the arch leader, and some of his principal gangsters deemed it the part of discretion to retire from Russia temporarily, and they got to Sweden without the slightest difficulty, no attempt having been made to stop them. Some of the minor employees of the Kaiser were arrested, among them a woman in whose name the bank account appeared to be. But she too, and probably all the others, were later released. A government like this could not bring peace and order into a distracted nation. It could not establish a democracy. It could not govern. The sooner the allied countries realize this the better it will be for Russia and for the world that wants peace. It is not because I am unfriendly to Russia that I write thus. It is because I am friendly, because I have faith in the future of the Russian people, because I believe that their experiment in popular government, if it succeeds, will be as inspiring to the rest of the world as our own was in the eighteenth century. I think the most unkind thing any friend of Russia can do is to minimize or conceal the facts about the terrible upheaval going on there at the present time. Russia looks to the American people for help in her troubled hour, and if the American people are to help they will have to understand the situation. No discouragement to the allies, no assistance to the common enemy need result from a plain statement of the facts. The enemy knows all the facts already.