The street car conductor wrung her hands and begged to be allowed to go on. The time schedule had to be observed. “Please, sister, please,” she entreated, and at last she was permitted to ring the bell and send her car forward. As it turned the corner the men were still waving and laughing and wiping the tears from their cheeks. I don’t believe those men had called any committee meetings before obeying their nurses, or ever reminded the doctors that it was a free country now and they could take medicine or not as they pleased. You certainly got tired of that overworked phrase “It’s a free country now.” You hear it on all sides in Russia. “It’s a free country,” says a man with a third-class ticket taking possession of a first-class compartment. “It’s a free country,” declares a soldier, tossing a handful of sunflower seed shells on a woman’s white shoes in a street car. “It’s a free country,” say a group of men, stripping off their clothes before a crowd of women and children and taking a bath in the Neva. This occurs frequently on the Admiralty quay, a great pleasure resort in Petrograd. “They called them Sans Culottes during the French Revolution,” said a clever woman writer in one of the newspapers. “Our men will go down to fame as Sans Caleçons. The difference, perhaps, between a political and a social revolution.” The first French phrase means without trousers. The second carries the denuding process to its concluding stage. In this kind of a free country nobody is free. Try to imagine how it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of Labor should walk in and say: “We have come to control you. Produce your books and all your confidential papers.” This is what happens to cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a slave to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates. Of course, the simile is grossly unfair to the American Federation of Labor. Our organized labor men are the most intelligent working people in the community, and most of them have had a long experience in citizenship. Above all, their loyalty, as a body, has been amply demonstrated. The Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has among its members loyal, honest, intelligent men and women. But it has also a number of extreme radicals, people who would dishonor the country by concluding a separate peace with Germany, and who care nothing for the interests of any group except their own. Nobody in Russia has very much experience in citizenship, and the working people have less than others. Yet the soviet, to give the council its local name, deems itself quite capable of passing on all affairs of state, not only in Russia but in the allied countries as well. The soviets have had the presumption to announce that they are going to name the peace terms, although Russia