The question may be raised as to why we should consider the peasant seriously. We do not have to if we do not want to, but we should, for what happens in Russia during the next decade or two will have serious effects upon us, our national existence, and the future of our children. I do not mean this in a sense of what they may do to us, but in the sense of what they may do with themselves. What has happened in Siberia and all Russia during the last couple of years has alarmed us. The happenings were the result partly of our belief in the last fifty years, that what happened in Russia was no concern of ours. We have suddenly awakened to the fact that injustice and intrigue and a weak monarch on the other side of the world, can have a most decided effect upon us. We got a good deal of amusement out of Wilhelm of Germany and his “mailed fist” and “shining armor”--it was all a merry show to us. We are just beginning to pay the piper. We have had a demonstration that what foreign princes may do is decidedly our business. We may not have learned the lesson fully. It is apparent that Bolshevism made a powerful appeal to the peasants of Siberia, as it did to the submerged class of all Russia. The readiness with which these benighted people took up a saturnalia of crime in order to right certain crimes which had been committed against them, startled the world. The universality of Bolshevism in Russia actually led many people of peasant-minds here and abroad, to suspect that there was something good behind it all--it was hard to believe that a nation of two hundred million human beings supposedly civilized, could be so utterly wrong. And while Bolshevism was wrecking a vast nation, it seemed impossible to get any definite idea of what it was, and what it intended to do. Many of our people are still in that frame of mind, despite the fact that a nation has been wrecked. There are charges and counter-charges, accusations and denials, and all the while wholesale murder is going on. People at home, supposed to have brains, still argue that Bolshevism is a good thing, a just thing, and the only justice in government that there is. They have not seen the wreckage. There are others who have seen the wreckage, but are so enamored of a theory which they have upheld, that they will not admit the terrible things they have seen because these things would prove them and their theory to be wrong. These people could look at a train wreck in which a hundred persons were killed, and say: “There is nothing to worry about. This all means that we will build better cars and use safety devices. And if we don’t like the color of the new cars, we will wreck the trains till we get equipment that suits us. It is necessary that people die in order to have cars which meet our tastes in colors. What happens to the passengers does not worry us--we have theories of railroading which must be carried out, even if in testing them everybody in the country is killed.”