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long will it be before a German Socialist will come as Germany's ambassador?' Besides these, pamphlets were got out in English, French, Swedish, Turkish, Musselman and Chinese. I came in close contact with these propaganda workers while I was working for the American Y.M.C.A., getting out and distributing copies of President Wilson's Fourteen Point speech. The Russians liked that speech and agreed with most of its fourteen points, but were a little sceptical as to whether the Allies would stand by it.
"I got up to Petrograd in time to spend six interesting weeks seeing big things happen there, with John Reed, Louise Bryant and Albert Rhys Williams. I was at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee when it decided to let the Constituent Assembly meet for one day as a demonstration of class line-up. And I saw the Assembly dissolved early one morning by a sailor who did it simply by telling them that the Red Guard was tired and wanted to go home.
"I saw one whole Sunday of bourgeois protest meetings in Moscow. These were carried on in a very sensible way. Two hundred or more groups of two or three bourgeois men and women formed about the city, each group engaging a few soldiers in an argument. There was no disorder, the Russians are so amazingly reasonable. But no one succeeded in convincing the soldiers that they had done wrong in taking the power away from the 'natural rulers,' as the bourgeois put it.
"'Why don't you trust the educated people to lead you, instead of putting faith in this Lenin, this German agent?' some bourgeois men asked one soldier.
"'We are dark and ignorant, I know,' the soldier replied, 'but there is one thing we do know, and that is that the educated people have always deceived us.'
"I saw some of the 'dark and ignorant' Russian people at their work of governing. In one place I saw the village Soviet meeting, half a dozen stolid-faced earnest workingmen and peasants discussing ways and means of forming a farmers' school and using a calculating board with bobbins on a wire to help them with their adding and subtracting.
