people, but with entirely different objects. The autocracy was trying to create a revolution which should fail. The bourgeoisie was trying to prevent the autocracy from creating a revolution at all. Looking back over a year, it is almost laughable to think that it was the autocracy that arrested the whole labor group of the Central War Industries Committee, because that group of patriotic Socialists had shown themselves capable of preventing trouble with the workmen. It is more than laughable to remember that Miliukov, the Cadet leader, sent a statement to the papers alleging that someone pretending to be Miliukov had been urging the workmen to come out into the streets, but that actually he begged the workmen, for their own sakes, to do nothing of the kind.
This is not the place in which to give detailed accounts of the methods whereby the autocracy prepared the artificial fireworks, which, unfortunately for them, turned into a very genuine volcano. It is enough to say that for several months before the revolution they had been running kindergarten classes for policemen in the use of machine-guns just outside Petrograd, that armored cars had been kept back from the front with a view to moving target practice in the streets of the capital, and that weeks before the actual disorders, Petrograd had been turned into a fortified battleground, with machine-gun ambrasures in the garrets of the houses at points of strategical advantage. Meanwhile the food shortage, already serious in the preceding September, had been steadily emphasized. The whole labor of the country had been mobilized, put in uniforms, armed, and taken from the land, thus ensuring starvation for the nation in the not distant future. Starvation in the present was ensured by complete breakdown in the always inadequate transport. Dissatisfaction with the Government was common to every class of the population, although it had different causes. Thus the bourgeoisie were dissatisfied with the Government because it put difficulties in the way of a successful waging of the war that was to give Russia Constantinople. The aristocracy were dissatisfied with the Tsar on account of his inability to keep his family in order or to hide the fact that it was in disorder, the folk, the great bulk of the nation, were dissatisfied with the Government because they held the Government responsible for the increasingly difficult conditions of their lives. They were dis-
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