For I believe very sincerely that in such a matter as this the good end cannot be achieved by vile means, and that the extremists who use methods of force and violence are preparing the ground for a reaction so complete that it would not be surprising if it ended with a new king on every one of the vacant thrones of Europe. But the biggest blunder of all is made by those people who start with the assumption that Russia is like the rest of Europe, and that her people are the same as ours. It is the most fatal blunder. Russia is, in size, not a country, but a continent. It contains one hundred and twenty-five millions of people who speak fifty different languages. The neighbouring federated states take their orders from Moscow in everything except local affairs, and the so-called independent border states will one day discover their economic relationship to Russia and will federate. Such a population, with such resources as Russia possesses, will become a blessing or a menace to the rest of the world. The Russian people are the most illiterate in Europe. Their civilisation is generations behind Western civilisation and is of a different sort. They have a tradition of tyranny that sets them in a different category from the people of Anglo-Saxondom. They are a silent, passive people for the most part, sentimental and idealistic. They are composed, in the main, of peasants whose chief absorbing interest is the land which they love with intense passion. Such a people are in huge contrast to the teeming industrial populations of Great Britain and America. In these countries the workers have long enjoyed a measure of political and social freedom unknown to the people of Russia. They have organised themselves politically and industrially on a big scale, and the standard of comfort they have been able to exact for themselves and their families from the employing classes and from Parliament is very considerably higher in average than the best the Russian workman has known. Most of the organised workers of Great Britain (and probably of America also) possess a little property, if it is only the dividend they draw from the Co-operative Stores. The illiterate man or woman is practically unknown amongst them. Their children enjoy free education. Their cities are organised and comparatively healthy. With the power of the franchise and the industrial power of their trade organisation they can achieve any reform they may desire. They possess a tradition of freedom of conscience, of speech, of Press, of general living which no tyrant in office would dare long and without good cause to defy.