The murmurs of “Counter-revolutionist!” grew louder and louder. The soldiers and sailors flocked down the stairs, and crowded around the delegates. Some of the Bolshevik members who had remained in the ball-room surrounded Chernoff, and took him in safety through the hostile throng to the gate. Every man who walked out in the gray morning knew that the Constituent Assembly was at an end. It was foredoomed to just this fate. Its existence hung upon one point--the acceptance or rejection of a government of people’s commissaries. For the moderate Socialists to have accepted the Bolsheviki, whose leaders they had denounced as usurpers and traitors and whose work they had been sabotaging, would from their standpoint have been impossible. For the People’s Commissaries to have permitted themselves to be rejected would have been to acknowledge themselves a body of adventurers, and all of their decrees mere scraps of worthless paper. I have never met in any country any group of men possessed of such power as theirs who would have acted otherwise. The Constituent Assembly contained the seeds of a great governmental experiment, but they were scattered upon the rocks of uncompromise, and there could be no harvest. At midnight Albert Williams was talking to Madame Kolontai. “How long do you think the Constituent Assembly will last?” he asked. “Comrade, don’t you think it has lasted too long already?” she answered. CHAPTER XXII THE INTELLIGENTZIA OBJECTS The Constituent Assembly never met again. At the hour when the delegates were supposed to reassemble, the Tauride Palace was dark. In the white hall at Smolney the members of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviet were gathered to discuss its dissolution. For all practical purposes, this had been accomplished that morning when the guard told the members to go home. The Central Executive Committee was merely planning to place its rubber stamp upon the proceedings. In the chair was Sverdloff--the very same who the day before had presided at the historic gathering. The meeting opened in a storm. Half a dozen speakers demanded an investigation of the bloodshed. Rosanoff, the head of the labor unions, and several other men protested against the dissolution of the Assembly. Then Lenin arrived. As he walked down the aisle, Krameroff, the good-natured but irrepressible protestor at all meetings, arose to the full height of his six feet five and shouted: “Long live the dictator!” In a minute there was a mob of angry men upon their feet, angry at Krameroff and shouting violently: “Put him out! Put him out!”