very strained relations, Zubatof's activity formed a new
base of contention. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the
very risky experiment came to an untimely end.

In St. Petersburg a similar experiment was made, and it ended much more
tragically. There the chief role was played by a mysterious personage
called Father Gapon, who acquired great momentary notoriety. Though a
genuine priest, he did not belong by birth, as most Russian priests
do, to the ecclesiastical caste. The son of a peasant in Little Russia,
where the ranks of the clergy are not hermetically sealed against
the other social classes, he aspired to take orders, and after being
rusticated from a seminary for supposed sympathy with revolutionary
ideas, he contrived to finish his studies and obtain ordination. During
a residence in Moscow he took part in the Zubatof experiment, and
when that badly conducted scheme collapsed he was transferred to St.
Petersburg and appointed chaplain to a large convict prison. His new
professional duties did not prevent him from continuing to take a keen
interest in the welfare of the working classes, and in the summer of
1904 he became, with the approval of the police authorities, president
of a large labour union called the Society of Russian Workmen, which had
eleven sections in the various industrial suburbs of the capital. Under
his guidance the experiment proceeded for some months very successfully.
He gained the sympathy and confidence of the workmen, and so long as
no serious questions arose he kept his hold on them; but a storm was
brewing and he proved unequal to the occasion.

In the first days of 1905, when the economic consequences of the war
had come to be keenly felt, a spirit of discontent appeared among
the labouring population of St. Petersburg, and on Sunday, January
15th--exactly a week before the famous Sunday when the troops were
called into play--a strike began in the Putilof ironworks and spread
like wildfire to the other big works in the neighbourhood. The immediate
cause of the disturbance was the dismissal of some workmen and a demand
on the part of the labour union that they should be reinstated. A
deputation, composed partly of genuine workmen and partly of Social
Democratic agitators, and led by Gapon, negotiated with the managers of
the Putilof works, and failed to effect an arrangement. At this moment
Gapon tried hard to confine the negotiations to the points in dispute,
wherea