“Two weeks of the Bolsheviki, and we will be able to lick these people into shape,” he said. “The worse things get, the sooner they will be willing to listen to reason. You don’t know the Russians.” “We’ve got them on the run this time”--what could it mean? No good to Kerensky, I was sure--no ultimate good to the masses of the Russian people, if Baron B. could have his way. There was nothing in the situation that night that augured well for Kerensky’s government. He was like a man poised on a tight-rope. The cry, “All power to the Soviet!” grew louder and more insistent with every passing hour. The Russian workers, the youngest proletarian group in the world, were the most class-conscious and determined, and--they had guns. The fleet was Bolshevist--I had no doubt of that. The Petrograd garrison was Bolshevist. Every report from the front indicated that the men in the trenches had swung farther and farther to the left. The land and peace hunger clamored for immediate satisfaction. Kerensky, trying like the true democrat he was to please every one, succeeded in pleasing no one. He had lost touch with the masses. Attacked from above and below, from within and without, there seemed little hope for him. Those who should have been behind him, with every energy and influence they possessed, were secretly willing his downfall, and some of them were plotting to bring it about. Individual members of the Allied military missions, still clinging to the old belief that Russia could be saved by a man on horseback, in spite of the Korniloff fiasco, were meeting behind closed doors, where they discussed, not the way to save Kerensky, but the way to put a dictator in his place. The names of Korniloff and Savinkoff were again bandied about where ever two or three military men were gathered together. Poor Kerensky! Too big, and not big enough. Any one of his problems was a man-sized job. He was packing the load of a broken industrial and economic machine, inherited from the régime of the Tsar, a corrupt, inefficient, and disloyal bureaucracy, and a betrayed and disillusioned army. His uncomprehending military partners, the Allies, were urging the impossible, and refusing to grant the demand of the Russian masses for a statement of war aims and a publication of the secret treaties, without which Kerensky could no longer hold the faith of his followers. Dark forces of the old order were working with German intriguers to augment the chaos, and above and beyond and beneath everything was the honest cry of the people for “Peace to the world!” and “Land to the peasants!” The Bolsheviki promised peace and land. They promised more: they promised that the workers of the world should “arise and put a stop to war and capitalistic exploitation forever.”