With the tragic failure of the first Revolution of 1905 and 1906, when the Workers tried to take control and lost everything, still fresh in their memory, they were trying desperately to coöperate, to give and take, to use the power of the intellectuals and at the same time direct revolution into the channels through which they wanted it to flow. They were theorists who had always been denied the right of action. Never having been allowed to try to put any of their theories into practice, they had never learned how to compromise. Each group was willing to die for its own particular definition of revolution, but no group was able to yield to the theory of another. Consequently, Cabinet crises followed Cabinet crises. [Illustration: Around the statue of Alexander III, symbol of old Russia, the talking multitudes surged] [Illustration: First Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies] [Illustration: Alexander Kerensky in the study of the Tzar] [Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman The great stucco Winter Palace in which the American guests were housed] Prince Lvoff and the scholarly Miliukoff had already been retired to private life before the Root Commission reached Russia. Miliukoff, student of English institutions, saw freedom for Russia in the terms of a constitutional monarchy. To him, and to the liberals who gathered around him, this was a sufficiently radical step for a country that had only yesterday crawled out from under the iron boot of absolutism. He and his followers were a hopeless minority, and, in spite of their past struggles for Russian freedom, were soon discarded, with the monarchial idea. They were liberals and could not follow Russia into the new social realms she was so eager to explore. The demand of the people for a republic was insistent. The republican idea satisfied some, but not enough. A social democracy--a socialist state--became the loudest cry of the articulate proletariat. I heard it on the street corners and in the crowded trams, along the wide paths of the parks, and in the assembly rooms of palaces whose ancient walls might well have shuddered at the strangeness of such sentiments. Much of the time they talked of war, and I heard unkempt soldiers in dilapidated uniforms and workmen in shoddy suits demanding “an interbelligerent conference,” “statement of Allied war aims,” “publication of the secret treaties,” as glibly as workingmen at home discuss hours and wages.