Importance of the muzhik in the future--Ancient republican traditions--Greek church and bureaucracy run Russian institutions--Weight of the peasant vote in the Duma--How the peasant’s belief in “God and Czar” is waning--Strokes of disillusionment--Indifference to time--Muzhik nonchalance--Strange sects--Muzhik religion--A characteristic legend--Practical ethics--The muzhik not necessarily lazy--Muzhik shrewdness--The dawning of self-consciousness. The future of Russia lies in the muzhik. With an agrarian population aggregating eighty per cent. of the total population, the balance of power must ultimately rest with the majority. Since the war with Japan the world has begun to see the Russian peasant in a new light. No longer the ignorant, slothful creature he has been depicted, but a thinking man of strong frame, promising rare development in the future if individual advancement can be encouraged under a wise, sane, and humane administration. “The Russian peasant is the best raw material in Europe from an industrial point of view,” an American manufacturer in Russia once said to me. “He is powerfully built, naturally imitative, and adaptable.” Long before the Mongols invaded Russia, Russia held republican traditions. The states which now make up the Russian empire were formerly ruled by princes and dignitaries elected by the people, and, indeed, Michael Romanoff, the first of the present reigning house, was chosen czar without opposition of arms or other force, so that even Nicholas II is where he is to-day because of a republican custom which raised his forebears to the throne. The Russian church is not Russian. It calls itself Greek “Orthodox.” It is an importation from Byzantium just as the bureaucracy is an importation from Germany. The Russian peasant has submitted to these foreign impositions because they were foisted upon him, but in the village life there has been presented the spirit of pure democracy and republicanism. Therefore it is true that the Russian people do take kindly to reform, and herein lies the probability of the Russian peasant ultimately leading the world in social and economic reforms. When the power which must eventually be yielded to the peasantry has finally been wrested from autocracy and bureaucracy, the pendulum of the social revolution will swing wide, paralleling, if not surpassing, the French Revolution, and affecting the entire world.