I foresee the downfall of the blood-stained leaders and the crumbling of the Third International. I wait daily news of change. Either internal collapse or change of mind is coming, a second revolution or evolution directed by hands less guilty. Russia stinks to heaven like some horrible battlefield left over from the War. She presents a ghastly anomaly in the midst of our new time of peace. The will of the world and her own inner will now correspond-she must get cleaned up.

God defend us any more from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia, but what we ought to envisage for the future is a democratic federation of States in which the external republics, now independent, function equally with the internal ones, now largely impotent: some sort of United States of Russia including self-ruling Esthonia, Georgia, and the rest, a great sane economic unity with a strong central authority. This would be of untold gain to the Old World.

That would mean, among other things, the return of the educated émigrés; the furnishing of Russia with at least the cadre of an executive capable of administering the country; the abolition of the Cordon Sanitaire of small republics between Russia and Germany; resumption of

Russia's rôle as feeder of the industrial West; resumption of her cultural effort in science, literature, art, music, etc.; revival of religious life in her educated classes; peace in Central Asia and in China, and a return of all Europe to the normal.

Something of the Soviet system is likely to remain. The word "soviet " means " council" or "committee". Government by a freely elected Soviet is not foreign to Russia, nor is the name distasteful. Even the late Imperial Senate of Russia was in reality called the Gosudarstvenny Soviet or State Council.

However, in all these prognostications one must moderate one's optimism, bearing in mind certain almost fatal handicaps in Russian character-slowness, passivity, illogicality in thought and action, impracticality, quarrelsomeness. The new words in these years of bitter self-criticism tell of terrible psychological defects-oblomovstchina, the state of being like Mr. Oblomov, a character in Russian fiction, who could never make up his mind to any heroic action; partiïnost, the state of mind of people who put party before country. The émigrés are bitterly and fantastically divided by party ties, when they ought so soundly to have been united by the adversity of the Russia they all love.

We think about Russia as Teutons and Celts think of her, but she is not like us, and has not many of our useful virtues, though she has some decorative ones of her own which we do not possess. In private life many people have found out that you cannot help a Russian ". You seldom foresee what a Russian is going to do. He is not strongly guided by motives of self-preservation as we are. Our main mental retreat and consolation is that he belongs to a people who obviously cannot easily be destroyed.

Some opposition to a restored Russia federated and unified is likely from the succession States. Rumania will not want to give up Bessarabia, nor Poland the Kresi; the Baltic States will want to hold the sea and tax the users of it for their own profit. Petty nationalism will rear its head against an all-Russian State, but of course Europe will only sustain the obstructions to barbarism as long as Russia remains barbaric. The ridge going from north to south across Central Europe is naturally not good for our health as a whole. Germany is recovering and recapturing the sympathies of the rest of the world, and will naturally take back most of the territory she has lost in the East. She will remain adverse to Poland, and her obvious tendency in the coming years of

peace and growing power will be to close up the corridor. The new Russia should not be unfriendly to the new Germany. Both have learned at a terrible price the peril of a disturbance of Europe's peace.

Atheism, Communistic devo- Bunin, 10, 183, 185 seq.