was not a mere political Revolution, and political changes which left the essential social structure unchanged, which did not tend to bring about equality of democratic opportunity, and which left the control of the nation in the hands of landowners and capitalists, could never satisfy the masses nor fail to invite their savage attack.  Only the most hopeless and futile of doctrinaires could have argued themselves into believing anything else.  It was quite idle to argue from the experience of other countries that Russia must follow the universal rule and establish and maintain bourgeois rule for a period more or less prolonged.  True, that had been the experience of most nations, but it was foolish in the extreme to suppose that it must be the experience of Russia, whose conditions were so utterly unlike those which had obtained in any nation which had by revolution established constitutional government upon a democratic basis.

To begin with, in every other country revolution by the bourgeoisie itself had been the main factor in the overthrow of autocracy.  Feudalism and monarchical autocracy fell in western Europe before the might of a powerful rising class.  That this class in every case drew to its side the masses and benefited by their co-operation must not be allowed to obscure the fact that in these other countries of all the classes in society the bourgeoisie was the most powerful.  It was that fact which established its right to rule in place of the deposed rulers.  The Russian middle class, however, lacked that historic right to rule.  In consequence of the backwardness of the nation from the point of view of industrial development, the bourgeoisie was correspondingly backward and weak.  Never in any country had a class so weak and uninfluential essayed the role of the ruling class.  To believe that a class which at the most did not exceed six per cent. of the population could assert and maintain its rule over a nation of one hundred and eighty millions of people, when these had been stirred by years of revolutionary agitation, was at once pedantic and absurd.

The industrial proletariat was as backward and as relatively weak as the bourgeoisie.  Except by armed force and tyranny of the worst kind, this class could not rule Russia.  Its fitness and right to rule are not appreciably greater than the fitness and right of the bourgeoisie.  It cannot even be said on its behalf that it had waged the revolutionary struggle of the working class, for in truth its share in the Russian revolutionary movement had been relatively small, far less than that of the peasant organizations.  With more than one hundred and thirty-five millions of peasants, from whose discontent and struggle the revolutionary movement had drawn its main strength, neither the bourgeoisie nor the class-conscious section of the industrial proletariat could set up its rule without angry protest and attacks which, soon or late, must overturn it.  Every essential fact in the