Here and there a group talked of the coming of the American Commission. Usually the spokesman was an unofficial diplomat returned from the United States and bringing his own decided idea of us and our faults. There were many of these in Petrograd in the days of early June. Some of them hailed from Hester Street; and Hester Street and New York’s East Side became formidable factors in complicating the international situation. They had seen all of the worst and none of the best of America. They sat at the tables in the tea-room where the members of the Soviet of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies gathered around the samovar, and told stories of poverty and suffering on the East Side. “Root is coming to make you fight,” they said. “Root doesn’t care anything about the Revolution. He’s a capitalist, a corporation attorney, a hide-bound reactionary. In the United States he’s against the workers.” Most of these men were honest revolutionists, soap-boxers, actuated by nothing more than hatred of the capitalistic system and a distrust of all things bearing a government stamp. There were other unofficial diplomats in Petrograd whose words had a different origin. They were under orders from Berlin, and their business was to discredit America and the Allies and make the Russian masses believe the German people were the true friends of Revolution. They conducted a telling and profitable propaganda. To begin with, they had linguistic and geographical advantages that the Allies could not overcome. Many Germans speak Russian, still more Russians speak German. Being next-door neighbors, the Germans understood the Russian psychology. They knew that nothing in the world meant anything to the mass of the Russians but saving their Revolution, and they simulated a sympathy for revolution that they were temperamentally incapable of possessing. They pictured Germany as hungry for democratic peace, and the Allies as imperialists who would not stop fighting until they had crushed the German masses and divided the German territory. They accused the Allies of trying to continue the war for the purpose of destroying the Revolution. They took the passion and idealism of the Russian mass and tried to turn it to their own ends. They also had something to say about the coming of the American Commission, and they said it where it would take effect. For the most part, unofficial Russia was too engrossed in its own very important business to pay much attention to the tall, gray-haired, distinguished American who was coming to town. Unofficial Russia was concerned chiefly with defining revolution, and each individual group was possessed of a passionate necessity for making the other groups accept its definition. All together, it was not a happy situation into which the imperial train was bringing the American diplomats that June afternoon. The train, looking almost as it did when the royal family last journeyed forth from Petrograd, slipped into view on the appointed second.