them have left school before the age of ten and have gone into the mines, factories, and shops to begin their life of labor. They have worked at the lowest wages of any workers in the large industrial nations of Europe; they have fought their battle in the face of a brutal and reactionary government, which has always eadeavored openly and underhandedly to destroy the co-operatives, the unions, and the political party. Furthermore the German movement was old, the trade unions of England and America were mature when this tiny little country of Belgium gave birth to its Socialist party. Almost all of these economic and political organisations, now wielding such power, have come into existence within the last twenty-five years.

The working people of Belgium have had to fight for everything; nothing has been given them, not a step has been taken without suffering. Indeed it was their misery that drove them together to make a common struggle. It is their suffering and their martyred brothers that have so united their life and spirit that not a single important division has occured in the movement during the last twenty years. The party is a practical and efficient one, and its members would never think of neglecting any opportunity open to them to fight the battle of the disinherited. They scorn no method, they eagerly use and develop' all. They believe in co-operation, in trade unions, in municipal ownership and in national ownership; they believe in economic action and they believe in political action; indeed when anyone of these methods is but weakly developed, the whole party with hearty good will and with all the energy in its power gives its mind and effort to strengthen it. While other countries are discussing theories, while the working men elsewhere differ in their opinion as to methods and while especially the working men of America quarrel among themselves, the working class movement in the little paradise of the capitalists has been born and has grown to full maturity.

It seems hard to explain why it is that the Belgian working class is so fortunate, and why in the face of so many difficulties and even without universal manhood suffrage they are able to do so well what we seem to be unable to do at all. As I have said before it seems to me largely due to the advice and example of the old warrior of the Internationale, César De Paepe. He counselled solidarity at the day the party was born and he never ceased to repeat it. It is therefore significant that just about the time he was carried away from Brussels to die in Southern France, he should have written these words to the then assembled congress of the party: "I beg of you one permission, one only. Permit an old socialist, who has been in the breach for more than 33 years and who has already seen so many ups and downs, so many

periods of progress and of reaction in the revolutionary Belgian parties, to give you counsel. That is; Be careful, above all, in all your deliberations and resolutions, to maintain among the different factions of the party and among the more or less extreme or moderate tendencies the closest possible union and to prevent all that can constitute even a suspicion of division. Naturally this implies that it is necessary to commence by forgetting the divisions which have existed in the past. To divide you in order the better to oppress you, such is the tactic of your enemies. Flee from divisions; avoid them; crush them in the egg; each ought to be your tactic, and to that end may your program remain the broadest possible and your title remain general enough to shelter all who in the Belgian proletariat, wish to work for the emancipation, intellectual and material, political and economic of the mass. of disinherited." ROBERT HUNTER.

T

Rise of the Russian Proletariat.

PREFACE.

HE HISTORY of all society, thus far, is the history of class strife." These are the words of Karl Marx and their truth is accepted by most historical students today.

Since the Plebeians of Rome rose against their Patrician oppressors the working class has been engaged in revolutions. By the burning of manor houses, by the smashing of new machinery, by defending barricades and by the more peaceful but no less bitter warfare of strikes and boycotts the workers, the world over, have been in almost ceaseless revolt against the class which does not work. Sometimes these revolts have been inspired, have been directed or misdirected by members of another class, but always the Strength and Blood have come from the workers. And so it is that a knowledge of Revolutions; of their aims, their methods and their results, is of momentous interest to the working class. In no Revolution,not excepting the Paris Commune,-have the wrongs and the aspirations of the mass of workers been so clearly and so insistently proclaimed as in this Revolution in Russia. It is a workingman's Revolution.

During the last two years a great deal has been written about Russia. But most of this has appeared in costly volumes or expensive monthly or weekly publications which are out of the reach of the vast majority of wage-earners. The working men of America have had to rely on the daily papers for their information. This source of information has two great drawbacks. It is always scattered and unrelated, and it is generally prejudiced.

And these pages are written on the assumption that there is in America a large number of working people who want to know how and for what their brothers are fighting on the other side of the world; who want some connected and brief account of this the greatest of the world's Revolutions.

These chapters do not pretend to the dignity of History. The events are of too recent occurrence and the writer has been too close to affairs to get either the perspective of time or the purely impersonal attitude which are supposed to be fundamental in History. But there will be some compensation for

these defects in the fact that the writer was on the spot and to a certain extent concerned in the events narrated.

In order to understand properly the recent events in Russia some knowledge of the history of the country is necessary; therefore indulgence is asked for the brief, historical sketches which are sprinkled through the accounts of more recent oc

currence.

INTRODUCTION.

The surprises and seeming contradictions which Russia holds for a Westerner are unending.

I had read in the papers of the labor demonstrations under Father Gapon and of the wonderful, general strike of October and was prepared to find a large and highly developed proletariat. One of my first surprises was to find that scarcely ten per cent of the population were factory workers and that these were the most pitifully conditioned and poorly organized of modern proletariats.

Even a slight knowledge of history is, at first, a positive drawback to one studying the Russia of today. As modern. industry is very slightly developed one naturally looks for mediaeval institutions. But Russia is as far removed from Feudalism as it is from Capitalism.

The principal reason for this confusion is that Russians give words, which have a well defined meaning in the histories of Western Europe, utterly different meanings. You hear, for instance, of "A merchant of the First Guild," and you think of the trade guilds of England and search vainly for their counterpart in Russia. No similarity exists between the so-called "Burgher Class" there and the burghers of the old Flemish towns. "The ancient Republics of Kazan and Novgorod" are often referred to. In reality, they are more like the old German Empire than any Republic we know of. When the Dynasty died. out, as it often did in those days of incessant warfare, poisonings and murders, a few over-lords assembled and elected a new Despot. Neither the clergy nor the nobility plays a role similar to that which these classes took in Western Europe.

And so in studying Russia it is necessary to lay aside preconceived ideas. Russia is neither an advanced Asiatic Despotism nor a retarded Western Empire. The Slavic Civilization is unique. It has been influenced by its Tartar hordes on the East and by the ideas of its Western neighbors; but is distinct from either. And the assumption that the historic development of Russia must run in the same rut as that of Western Europe, leads only to bewildering mistakes.

It must also be borne in mind that Russia is not one nation but a group of nations. Its one hundred odd millions of inhabitants speak eighty different languages. It covers a territory twice the size of the United States, and the means of communication are very undeveloped. Odessa on the Black Sea, and St. Petersburg on the Baltic are in closer touch than many villages twenty miles apart.

The degree of education in different localities is also very unequal. In the Baltic Provinces, for instance, there are more people in every hundred who can read and write than in any republic on earth. In other parts of the Empire there are wild tribes more ignorant than our Indians; and between these extremes is the great body of the Russian people. A small class called the Inteligenzia are more cultured than the educated people in other countries, while in the peasant villages it is often difficult to find any one who reads.

Poland and Finland are examples of the dozen odd conquered nations whose hatred is not concentrated on the Tsar in particular, but is against the Russian people in general.

Each of these dissimilarities makes it increasingly difficult to speak of the Russian people as a whole. The distances are so great; the means of transportation so unequal and the education so varying that any united action seems almost impossible.

CHAPTER I.

GAPON.

The New Year of 1905 was ushered in with the usual hilarity in "The Bear," the swagger restaurant in the center of St. Petersburg. There was the glare of many lights and the blare of the military music. Officers in gorgeous uniform, and coarse women, the hangers-on of the Court,-in fine raiment, made the night loud with their merriment. But in the factory suburb all was gloom. What lights there were, were dim, oil lamps or feeble candles. The music came from the plaintive voices of mothers, singing their minor song of the villages as they tried to make their haggard babies forget the cold. And these women, if more honest, were less beautiful than those at "The Bear." There was no gayety, for the New Year held no promise save of twelve months more of bondage. Twelve months of the desolation of interminably long hours and unspeakably small pay. Twelve months more of the deterioration, mental, moral and physical, of mechanical routine; under-eating and over-crowding.

The center of St. Petersburg is a pleasure-place of palaces, playhouses and parks, but the City is encompassed by a ring of