But there, for me, was the trouble. They gave us all this luxury and beauty, but was it theirs to give or ours to receive? _They_ had no doubts on this score whatever. They could see nothing at all in the argument that the present possessor of property that belongs morally, if not legally, to the State, having been permitted to grow up in the belief that what the law sanctioned must necessarily be right, is not quite fairly treated if he is quite suddenly turned into the streets without resources, and his property confiscated. One would not dispute for a moment the principle that nobody should possess luxuries or even superfluous comforts until the elementary needs of everybody have been amply satisfied and secured; or that a royal palace is put to much better use when it shelters many industrious persons than when it houses a king’s mistress and her lackeys. But there is a difference as great as between black and white and right and wrong, between the declared will of the majority of the citizens acting through their National Assembly or Parliament which, in the interest of the community dispossesses an individual but secures the future of his wife and children as well as himself, and the arbitrary action of the minority in power, who roughly confiscate without consideration for the dispossessed. “Where is the owner of this beautiful house?” I asked several times, but I could get no reply. Nobody knew. I heard the story of a Princess Narishkin who was doing good work for the children under the Soviet, but do not know if it was true. One heard so many contradictory stories. If true, was she happy, I wondered? It might conceivably be so. The old revolutionary movement in Russia was by no means a one-class movement. Many of the old régime have willingly consented to the confiscation of their estates and goods and are content to do hard work for the new Republic. In such cases no question of right or wrong arises. These are rare souls. Before the end of the visit I met an old man who was the millionaire owner of a great line of steamships before the Revolution. The Revolution had completely dispossessed him. I found him quite content and happy about it. He formed part of the secretariat of an important Committee on Communications and travelled regularly as a Government employé on his own ships. His one grievance was the way in which the inventory of his fortune had been taken. He felt that his revolutionary record might have secured him more considerate treatment in the method of taking over his enterprises; but even on this point he was entirely without bitterness. In Astrakhan we met the owner of a great fish-curing industry, who had yielded up everything to the Republic without a murmur, and who declared himself happier making nets along with his former workpeople than he had ever been in his life.