with the tremendous tasks of economic, political, social, and religious reorganization, exhausted by a colossal foreign war, and threatened by a no less ominous civil war, can only be saved by a strong government and a liberal despotism. No doubt, the tasks before Russia are very different from those which France had to solve, but they are even more Titanic. A sweeping measure of agrarian reform, and perhaps of land-nationalization, the regeneration of the peasantry, the regeneration of the Church, the establishment of decentralization and of local government, the granting of autonomy to Poland, the solution of the racial problems—and especially of the Jewish problem and of the Armenian problem—these are some of the tasks before the Russian Government of to-morrow. No government but one invested with plenary powers could ever attempt to grapple with such Herculean labours.
(4) Such a strong government could not be formed, as in France, with purely revolutionary elements. Even a Reign of Terror could not evolve it, and the above-quoted dictum of Joseph de Maistre does not apply to Russia. The materials of a strong government do not exist in the revolutionary party, nor the possi-
