“He called me a pessimist,” said Verderevsky. “He told me the fleet was bad, but the army magnificent. If my pessimism had been interpreted differently then, we should have had a new discipline this autumn.” Before the committee adjourned, on the afternoon of our visit, they puzzled their heads over many problems of discipline; and the young secretary, Theodore Averitchkin, who took us to the Sailors’ Club, shook his head seriously as he unfolded the difficulties. “Instruction is what we need,” he said, as we drove through the spick-and-span streets of tidy little Helsingfors. “When the people got freedom, they forgot that they had not learned for three hundred years, and the masses who didn’t know anything understood freedom in their own way. The people who should educate us sit back and call us traitors. We are not traitors--it is bourgeois lying that is spread all over Europe about us. Tolstoy said that calumny was like a snowball, gathering snow as it rolls, and becoming bigger and bigger. Only those who are without honor can say that we are traitors. They forget the hundreds of our comrades who are in the grave of the Baltic Sea. There are not, and there never will be, traitors in the Baltic Fleet. Why don’t the people who talk so much about traitors come and give us some instruction? They don’t want to part with their fine automobiles and beautiful women. We are not asking for palaces and automobiles. We are asking only that all shall have a chance to learn and enough to eat.” Averitchkin spoke with the burning ardor of a convinced propagandist, and there was no doubt of his sincerity. The Sailors’ Club was a distinct surprise. I expected to see the usual Russian meeting-place: a big, stuffy, barnlike hall with a litter of dirt and cigarette stubs underfoot. Instead, we drew up before a five-story building, and six husky, clear-eyed sailor boys opened the door and welcomed us into the lobby of a first-class hotel. There were velvet carpets underfoot, cut-glass chandeliers overhead, palms and bay trees stationed at correct intervals, and not even the ghost of a cigarette stub in sight. The easy-chairs were filled with men in sailors’ uniforms, talking comfortably in small groups. In the dining-rooms others were gathered around little tables with snowy linen and shining silver. The head commissariat led the way, beaming with pride over my compliments. As we went from place to place, he explained that the club belonged to all the sailors of the world, and that any man would find a welcome there. There were ten thousand active members, and the men on shore leave spent most of their time there. Meals were served at cost, and the organization was run like any millionaires’ club to cater to the comforts of its members. In the days before the Revolution no sailor would have been allowed in such a building. Now the place was swarming with them, and they graced it as to the manner born.