Carlyle says that of all man’s earthly possessions, unquestionably the dearest to him are his symbols. They have the strongest hold on us without a doubt. At the time of the French revolution the sign and symbol of the old régime was the Bastille, that state prison in Paris which was the living grave of the king’s enemies, or of almost anybody who made himself unpopular with one of the king’s favorites. When the French people rose up in their might and swept the old régime out, the first thing they did, obeying a common impulse, was to tear down and destroy utterly the Bastille. In Russia the sign and symbol of the autocracy was the exile system, and particularly Siberia. The first thing the Russian people did when they rose up and dethroned the Romanoffs was to send telegrams to every political prison and to every convict village in Siberia that the prisoners and exiles were free. They sent orders to all the jailers and guards that the exiles were to be furnished with clothing and money and transportation to the railroads, and the railroads were directed to bring them back to Petrograd. There is something to warm the coldest blood in the thought of what it must have meant to those poor desolate creatures, living in the hopeless isolation of Siberia, to have the door of the cell open one February day and hear the words,“You are free!” Sometimes the announcement was prefaced by words of unheard of friendliness and courtesy from wardens and jailers who had before been cruel and brutal task-masters. “Please forgive me if I have been over-zealous in my duties,” these men would say, and the prisoner would think that he had gone mad and was dreaming. Then the announcement would come, unbelievable in its wonder; the revolution had actually happened. The Czar was gone. The prisoner was free. They heard that news in the depths of mines, where men worked shackled and hopeless. They heard it in lonely villages near the Arctic Circle. They heard it in far lands, where homesick men and women toiled in sweatshops among aliens. They were free, and Mother Russia was calling them home again. I should think they would almost have died of joy at the tidings. No generous mind can wonder that Russia called back her children, all of them, without stopping to sort out the good and the bad, the well and the sick, the desirable and the undesirable. Or without stopping to calculate how she was going to take care of them when they got there.