kers were clubbed to death by the storming crowds; others were pitched headlong into the Neva.
The Workers' Respect
for Life.
The attitude of the revolutionary working-classes toward human life, however, is not reflected in these mad, sporadic deeds of the hot-blooded and the irresponsible, but in one of the first laws the Soviet made as it entered into power.
As the ruling-class the workers were now in a position to take vengeance on their former exploiters and executioners. When I saw them rise up and take the government in their own hands, and at the same time take in their grasp those who had lashed them, jailed them and betrayed them, I feared a savage outburst of revenge.
I knew that thousands of the workmen now in authority had been sent with clanking chains across the snows of Siberia. I had seen them pallid and tottering from long years in those coffins for the living—the stone sacks of Schlusselburg. I had seen the deep scars cut in their backs by the Cossacks' nagaika and I recalled the words of Lincoln: "If for every drop of blood drawn by the lash another shall be drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are pure and righteous altogether."
But there was no dreadful blood-bath. On the contrary, the idea of reprisals seemed to have no hold on the minds of the workers. On November
