would regard it as an insult, and that the Russian peasants bore no ill-will towards the Emperor, but rather complained of the results of a system of government, which in the last few years has undergone and is still undergoing radical change--when such arguments were brought forward some of the Labour Members nearly burst with ironical cheers. Here, they thought, was the voice of officialdom, Torydom, and hypocrisy speaking. Now turn to the facts. When Professor Kovolievski was elected a member for the first Duma in the government of Kharkov as an advanced Liberal member, he after his election asked some of his peasant electors whether he was not right in supposing that had he said anything offensive with regard to the Emperor at his meetings, there would have been no applause. [1] The book is at this moment forbidden by the Censorship in Russia. “We should not only not have applauded,” was the answer, “but we should have beaten you to death.” And I am convinced that if any of our Labour Members went to any Russian village with an interpreter, and made speeches on the subject of the Emperor of Russia, such as they made in the House of Commons, they would swiftly be lynched. This, of course, does not mean that the Russian peasant is averse to reform, or does not suffer from the evil effects of bad government; but it means that he is a Russian, and that is a thing which our enthusiastic Liberals entirely overlook, and they overlook it because they do not know what Russia is, or what a Russian is. They are divorced from fact and soar in wide spaces of theory. And that is the reason that although all my sympathies in Russia are with the poor, and with any people who contribute a mite towards the cause of reform, the ignorance of English Liberals on the subject makes me sick. In this book you will not find, thank Heaven, very much talk of politics. You will find, on the other hand, truthful and accurate records of real people, seen with the naked eye, unobscured by prejudice and not magnified by the spectacles of exaggeration. Also some true stories. I hope it will amuse you. That is all I have to say about this book. Books, like every other human thing, rarely end by being what they were meant to be. The books we dream of are magnificent, interesting, exhaustive, bulky, but nevertheless not too long. They glow in the imagination like a living coal. The books we write are scrappy, short, not sufficiently interesting, and often appear to be too long in spite of their brevity. So far from glowing, they resemble the ashes of an extinct cigar. Every time one finishes a book one thinks the next one will be better; but this is an illusion. This book is no exception to the melancholy rule, but such as it is, it is yours, and, I repeat once more, I hope you will like it. M. B. NORTH COTTAGE _London, 1908_ PREFACE