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, whereas the agitators put forward demands of a wider kind, such as the eight-hour working day, and they gradually obtained his concurrence on condition that no political demands should be introduced into the programme.  In defending this condition he was supported by the workmen, so that when agitators tried to make political speeches at the meetings they were unceremoniously expelled.

A similar struggle between the “Economists” and the “Politicals” was going on in the other industrial suburbs, notably in the Nevski quarter, where 45,000 operatives had struck work, and the Social Democrats were particularly active.  In this section of the Labour Union the most influential member was a young workman called Petroff, who was a staunch Gaponist in the sense that he wished the workers to confine themselves to their own grievances and to resist the introduction of political demands.  At first he succeeded in preventing the agitators from speaking at the meetings, but they soon proved too much for him.  At one of the meetings on Tuesday, when he happened to be absent, a Social Democrat contrived to get himself elected chairman, and from that moment the political agitators had a free hand.  They had a regular organisation composed of an organiser, three “oratorical agitators,” and several assistant-organisers who attended the small meetings in the operatives’ sleeping-quarters.  Besides these there were a certain number of workmen already converted to Social Democratic principles who had learned the art of making political speeches.