What the night might have brought forth if the weather had been fine, no one can know. Early in the evening it began to rain, and rain has a more dampening effect on the ardor of Russians than any amount of armed force. The populace stayed indoors. There was no one on the Nevsky to see the armored cars rush up and down, so they stopped rushing. The sailors sailed back to Kronstadt again in the boats that had brought them, and the Red Guard retired to the opposite side of the Neva. Before they left they encountered a group of Cossacks on the Liteiny, and turned the machine-guns on them. The Cossacks wheeled their horses about and fled, but not before half a dozen of them had gone down before the guns. The horses were still there next morning when I ventured out into the rain. Around them stood a curious circle of men and women and little boys in red peasant blouses, who looked as though they expected the beautiful ponies to rise up again and tell them what all this trouble was about. The government crisis was acute. Most of the ministers had resigned. The majority of the Council of Workmen and Soldiers had refused to take all the power. Taking power was a thankless task. The Council was already the government behind the government, and to become the government would be to become the scapegoat for all the various brands of a discontent growing daily more rampant in Russia, and for all those that were to follow as food became scarcer and living more difficult. Also, the majority of the Deputies, in spite of the general demand for peace, had voted against an immediate and independent termination of the war. The split between the majority made up of Mensheviki and Social Revolutionists and the Bolshevist minority was of ancient origin. It had its inception in the Socialist Conference in Switzerland in 1903, when the Bolsheviki rejected the Menshevist proposal to work with the Russian liberals for the spread of democracy in Russia, and advocated armed revolution. Nicolai Lenin, the leader then, as he is now, called the Mensheviki “opportunists,” and declared that the masses of the Russian people could never free themselves from economic as well as political slavery, except by means of a class war. When Kerensky determined to bring troops from the front to defend the government, the executive council of the Soviet sanctioned the decision. By noon on Wednesday, the government, or so much of it as was still in office, began to get things into its own hands. On the Nevsky, that day, a few of the food shops were open, but most of the shutters remained down and the doors barred. There were no street-cars running, and all the bridges except one were swung open. That part of the city that lay beyond the Neva, and is known as the Petrograd side, was practically isolated. Only the palace bridge remained closed, and guards from the troops loyal to Kerensky were stationed at the entrance and examined all who crossed over.