traffic their foodstuffs on the streets even as we have seen them
with handfuls of vegetables on the market streets of Archangel. Prices
were out of sight. Under a shawl in a tiny box, an old peasant woman on
Easter Day was offering covertly a few eggs at two hundred roubles
apiece.

Imagine the feelings of the boys when they walked about freely as they
did, being dressed in the regular Russian long coats and caps and being
treated with courtesy by all Russians who recognized them as Americans.
Here they found themselves looking at the great hotel built on American
lines of architecture to please the eye and shelter the American
travellers of the olden times before the great war, a building now used
by the Red Department of State. Here they were examined by one of
Tchicherin's men upon their arrival in the Red capital. Further they
could walk about the Kremlin, and visit a part of it on special
occasions. They could see the execution block and the huge space laid
out by Ivan the Terrible, where thousands of Russians bled this life
away at the behest of a cruel government.

Or they could stand before the St. Saveur cathedral, a noble structure
of solid marble with glorious murals within to remind the Slavic people
of their unconquerable resistance to the great Napoleon and of his
disastrous retreat from their beloved Moscow.

They cannot be blamed for coming out of Moscow convinced that the heart
of the Slavic people is not in this Bolshevik class hatred and class
dictatorship stuff of Lenin and Trotsky; equally convinced that the
heart of the Russian people is not unfearful of the attempted return of
the old royalist bureaucrats to their baleful power, and convinced that
the heart of this great, courteous, patient, longsuffering Slavic people
is groping for expression of self-government, and that America is their
ideal--a hazy ideal and one that they aspire toward only in general
outlines. Their ultimate self-government may not take the shape of
American constitutionalism, but Russian self-government must in time
come out of the very wrack of foreign and internecine war. And every
American soldier who fought the Bolshevik Russian in arms or stood on
the battle line beside the Archangel Republic anti-Bolshevik Russian,
might join these returned captives from Bolshevikdom in wishing that
there may soon come peace to that land, and that they may develop
self-government.

"We finally received our release. We had known o