Peasants all over the world magnify and consider obligatory labor in the ground, but the Russian peasant adds to this urge for bread labor a religious motive revealed in his formal greeting to his fellow workman in the field: "To every man his measure of grain, and may every man in the world be a Christian." This mystic connection between piety and bread labor has, of course, been expressed in many forms; to quote from an English poet:

"And when I drove the clods apart

Christ would be plowing in my heart." Or from a Norwegian:

"The Sower walked bareheaded in Jesus' name. Every cast was made with care in a spirit of kindly resignation; so it is throughout all the world where corn is sown little showers of grain flung at famine from the sower's hand."

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Certainly, tilling the soil, living a life of mutual labor has been at the bottom of many religious orders and mystic social experiments. From this point of view, Tolstoy had rejoiced that groups of Russian peasants had never owned land, but had worked it always with the needs of the whole village in mind, thus keeping close to Christian teaching and to a life of piety.

That this instinct of bread labor, the very antithesis of war, is widespread may be easily demonstrated. I have on my desk a newspaper clipping, a dispatch under a March date from Bressa in Asia Minor, which reads as follows: "The country has been revived by rains with the awakening of spring, and peasants are seen working in the fields, kissing the earth and thanking Allah for the blessed rain and also praying for peace and the riddance from the lands of the soldiers marching across to war."

When we were in Austria-Hungary in 1915 we were constantly told stories of Russian soldiers who throughout the spring had easily been taken prisoners because they had heard that war prisoners in Austria were working upon the land. These Russian peasant soldiers had said to their captors now that spring had come they wanted to get back to work, and so they would like to be made prisoners at least long enough to put the seed into the ground. They wished to put seed into the ground irrespective of its national or individual ownership.

I recall an evening years ago when I sat in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana, that Tolstoy begged us to remember that the Russian peasant did not change his nature when he shed his blouse and put on the czar's coat. Tolstoy predicted that the Russian peasants in their permanent patience, their insatiable hunger for bread labor, may at last make war impossible to an entire agricultural people. It is hard to determine whether the Russian soldiers who, in 1917, refused to fight had merely become so discouraged by their three years of futile war

fare and so cheered by the success of a bloodless revolution in Petrograd and Moscow that they dared to venture the same tactics in the very trenches; or whether these fighting men in Galicia yielded to an instinct to labor on the land, which is more primitive and more imperative than the desire for war.

During the early days of the Russian revolution it seemed to me that events bore out the assumption that the Russian peasants, with every aspect of failure, were applying the touchstone of reality to certain slogans evolved during the war, to unreal phrases which had apparently gripped the leading minds of the world. It was in fact the very desire on the part of the first revolutionists in the spring of 1917 to stand aside from political as well as from military organizations and to cling only to what they considered the tangible realities of existence which was most difficult for the outside world to understand. The speculation, as I recall it, evolved in my mind somewhat as follows:

The many Allied nations in the midst of a desperate war were being held together by certain formulae of their war aims which had gradually emerged during long years of mutual effort. Such stirring formulae or statements could be common to all the diverse Allies, however, only if they took on the abstract characteristics of general principles. This use of the abstract statement, necessary in all political relationships, becomes greatly intensified in time of war, as if illustrating the contention that men die willingly only for a slogan. The question inevitably suggested itself: Had the slogans -this is a war to end war and a war to safeguard the world for democracy-become so necessary to united military action that the Allies resented the naive attempt on the part of the Russian peasants to achieve democracy without war? They so firmly believed that the aims of the war could be accomplished only through a victory of the Allies that they would not brook this separation of the aim from the method. Apparently the fighting had become an integral part of the slogan itself.

The necessity for holding fast to such phases suggests one of those great historic myths which large bodies of men are prone to make for themselves when they unite in a common purpose requiring for its consummation the thorough and efficient output of moral energy. Man is so fertile in virtue and heroism, so prone to transcend his own powers, that the making and unmaking of these myths always accompany a period of great moral awakening. Such myths are almost certain to outlast their social utility, and very often they outlive their originators, as the myth of The Second Coming evolved by the early Christians held for a thousand years.

Had this myth of our contemporaries that democracy is to be secured through war so obsessed the Allies that they were con

strained to insist that the troops fight it out on the Eastern Front as elsewhere, in spite of the fact that fraternal intercourse, which the Russians were employing, is the very matrix of democracy? Had war so militarized and clericalized the leading nations of the world that it was difficult for them to believe that the Russian soldiers, having experienced that purification of the imagination and of the intellect which the Greeks believed to come through pity and terror, had merely been the first to challenge the myth, to envisage the situation afresh and reduce it to its human terms?

Vernon Lee contends that it is the essential characteristic of an historic myth that so long as it does not attempt to produce its own realization it begets unhesitating belief and wholesale action, and that as men go on expressing it with sufficient self-denying fervor they secure a great output of sanctity and heroism. The necessity for continuing this output, of unifying diverse nations, may account for the touch of fear easily detected on the part of the ardent advocates of war, when they were asked not to ignore the fact that at least on one front war was actually ending under conditions of disarmament and free trade. They did not admit that democracy could be established throughout one-sixth of the earth's surface if the Allies would only recognize the fact that the Russian soldiers had ceased to fight; Kerensky's group, or any other remaining in power, would at length have been obliged to acknowledge it, for no governmental group could have been upheld by the Russian people unless it had declared for peace and for free land.

Did

Did the Allies fear to jar the abstraction which had become so dear to them? they realize instinctively that they would cripple the usefulness of a slogan by acknowledging its partial achievement?

It was perhaps to be expected that Russia should be the first nation to apply the touchstone of reality to a warring world so absorbed in abstractions. If Tolstoy may be considered in any sense the prototype of his countrymen, it may be permitted to cite his inveterate dislike of abstractions, whether stated in philosophic, patriotic or religious terms; his firm belief that such abstractions lay the foundation for blind fanaticism; his oft-repeated statement that

certain forms of patriotism are inimical to a life of reason.

At that time the Allied nations were all learning to say that the end of this war would doubtless see profound political changes and democratic reconstruction, when the animalistic forces which are inevitably encouraged as a valuable asset in warfare should once more be relegated to a subordinate place. And yet when one of the greatest possible reconstructions was actually happening before their very eyes, the war-weary world insisted that the Russian soldier should not be permitted to return to the land but should continue to fight. This refusal on the part of the Allied gayernments suggests that they were so obsessed by the dogmatic morality of war, in which all humanly tangible distinctions between normal and abnormal disappear, that they were literally blind to the moral implications of the Russian attempt.

The Russian soldiers, suddenly turned into propagandists, inevitably exhibited a youthful self-consciousness which made their own emotional experience the center of the universe. Assuming that others could not be indifferent to their high aims, they placidly insisted upon expounding their new-found hopes. But all of this made the warring world, threatened with defeat if the German army on the Eastern Front were released, still more impatient.

Possibly as a foolish pacifist, wishing to see what was not there, I gave myself over to idle speculations, and the spiritual realism as well as the Realpolitik was with the Allied statesmen who forced Kerensky to keep his men at war even at the price of throwing Russia into dire confusion.

These statesmen considered the outcome of the Russian revolution of little moment compared to the future of civilization which was then imperilled by the possibility of a German victory if the men on the Eastern Front were allowed to reinforce the West. But such an assumption, based on the very doctrines of war, was responsible for BrestLitovsk; for "peace after a smashing victory;" for the remarkable terms in the Versailles treaty; for Trotsky's huge army; for much of the present confusion in the world. Did the Russians, for one golden moment, offer a way out? Or was the present outcome inevitable?

tistician F. M. Phillips. This report is now in press.

The investigation. which was begun early in 1919, had been requested by the Brotherhood of Operative Potters because they desired to disprove the contentions that their trade was extremely hazardous and that the workmen in certain occupations were likely to develop lead poisoning. These contentions were maintained by life insurance companies as grounds for discrimination in the granting of life insurance

Department O J2

Racine, Wisconsin