Very many times during the revolution it has
seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman prop-
erly equipped in this way was in Russia study-
ing the gigantic experiment which, as a country,
we are allowing to pass abused but not examined.
I did my best. I got, I think I may say, as near
as any foreigner who was not a Communist could
get to what was going on. But I never lost the
bitter feeling that the opportunities of study which
I made for myself were wasted, because I could
not hand them on to some other Englishman,
whose education and training would have enabled
him to make a better, a fuller use of them. Nor
would it have been difficult for such a man to
get the opportunities which were given to me
when, by sheer persistence in enquiry, I had over-
come the hostility which I at first encountered as
the correspondent of a "bourgeois" newspaper.
Such a man could be in Russia now, for the Com-
munists do not regard war as we regard it. The
Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied
Commission to come to Berlin a year ago to in-
vestigate the nature and working of the Autocracy.
The Russians, on the other hand, immediately

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