ng about 90 per cent of the entire population, they are still
very poorly educated, questions of national import remain outside their
horizon, and even their language is not the language of the educated
Russian, inasmuch as it lacks the rich vocabulary of modern life and
is devoid of the very conceptions to which this vast treasury of words
applies. Their mind, great as it is in its potentialities, still moves
in the furrows of familiar ideas abhorring things too much at variance
with inherited traditions or actual experience. Yet in the turmoil of
revolutionary activity the peasants are going to have their say and
may become the decisive factor, because they are voters and are casting
their votes for those leaders whose words they believe to contain the
greatest promise and the least menace of a general disruption of their
accustomed mode of life.

We are thus brought back, for the present at least, to the necessity
of recognizing that even the state of anarchy under which Russia is
laboring, even the rule of the renowned proletariat so much trumpeted
about by Lenine and Trotzky, is in reality the work of intellectuals,
an answer of the masses to the call of their leaders, a groping for
principles beyond their perception.

It suffices a very casual examination of the programs and resolutions of
various political parties to see the truth of this statement. They
are expressive of the opinions of the leaders, not of the masses; are
couched in the language of the educated Russian, not in that of the
workman or peasant and, except for the concluding slogans like "Peace,
Bread, and Land," are alien to the very spirit of the masses. In this
respect all parties are confronted with the same difficulty since all
strive to get the support of the masses, yet have to express principles
evolved through careful and extensive study of national, political, and
economic problems, strange to the uneducated mind. For the same reason
the methods of surmounting the difficulty differ in many respects and
are characteristic of each party.

The Conservative Intellectuals of Russia early realized the necessity of
meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing
to him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an
all-suffering motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a
powerful appeal upon the imagination, for a long time superseding and
forcing into the background the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled