of nobility handed down with the title-deeds from father to son, are either non-existent or of comparative unimportance in Russian society. There is also none of the keen sensitiveness to minute social distinctions and to the social proprieties which mark them that is so striking a feature of the life in "democratic" England and to which we have given the name "snobbery." There are of course social strata in Russia, but they are broadly marked and there is no sense of competition between them. A peasant is not ashamed of being a peasant, and when he meets a nobleman he meets him on terms of spiritual equality while acknowledging his superior position in the social scale. A twin-brother of English "snobbery" is English "hypocrisy." This, as has been well said, is a kind of "social cement," for it is a tribute to a standard of social conduct set up by the dominant class in a nation. And since there exists no dominant class in Russia, but only a dominant hierarchy drawn from all classes, hypocrisy is absent from the Russian character. Mr. Stephen Graham, who was, I believe, at one time a clerk in a London office, found our civilisation so intolerable that one day he flung it off and escaped to Russia, where he has lived as a peasant tramp for many years. To revolutionaries who met him and expressed their astonishment that an Englishman should choose Russia of all places to live in, he replied, "I came to Russia because it is the only free country left in the world." There is, in truth, much to be said for this startling remark. In no country on earth is there such unaffected good-will, such open hospitality, such an instinctive respect for personal liberty--liberty of thought and of manners--such tolerance for the frailties of human nature, such an abundance of what the great Russian novelist Dostoieffsky called "all-humanness" and St. Paul called "charity," as in Russia. All this, of course, did not come about as a result of the bureaucratic system; it springs like that system itself from the fundamentally democratic spirit of the Russian people.