While observing the peasants, and while discussing them in this book, I have tried to keep an open mind. I have not hesitated to reveal their worst side. I am willing to bring out in full force their exasperating habits of dilatoriness, their slow mental and physical gear which we describe as laziness, that we may realize their problem, and our problem in aiding them. There is another side to the shield. It is my opinion that the only hope which Russia has for regeneration, no matter how long it may take to do the work, lies in the peasant class. Not the actual stolid peasant, but in men and women from the peasant class. That is the difference and distinction in my whole statement. Breshkovsky, “Grandmother of the Revolution” is of the peasant class, but not peasant-minded. There are among the millions of peasants in Russia, men and women who are beyond their class in mental attainments. That ability may be latent, but it will rise to the top as surely as water seeks its own level. This quality of genius runs through the whole human race in all lands. The genius of Russia under the old régime could only express itself in protest against government, which was the biggest job at hand for the genius. And this expression frequently came in the form of literature. When Tolstoy and Gorky extolled the peasant, one a noble and the other a commoner, both were merely praying that the latent genius in a few individuals have a fair chance to come to flower. They were fighting oppression, though they gave us an idea that if the peasants all had a chance, all would reveal the quality of genius. That hope is absurd, in Russia or elsewhere. What we want, in Russia and at home, is that the peasant-minded people have comfort and justice though they persist in remaining peasant-minded, and that when an individual reveals extraordinary ability, he may develop it, and not be broken on the wheel for daring to lift himself out of the rut. My ideal is not a nation of peasants by any means. But I do insist that a large mass of our own population prefers to be peasant-minded, and fights against being anything else. There is but a small proportion of our population which demands art in literature, pictures, or anything else. There is a mental Bolshevism all about us at home. There is a clearly defined hostility against mental accomplishments, expressed in many newspaper cartoons, in fiction, and in the utterances of demagogues. Our small-town hoodlum who resents the well-dressed stranger as a “dude,” and despises good grammar and evidences of an education, is at heart a Bolshevist--he is hostile to the “upper class” just as is the Siberian peasant. The man in the motor car, who has no consideration for the pedestrian, is at heart a Cossack. Both classes are in a dangerous frame of mind.