they have suppressed all critics; and, finally, of their international policy.

The peculiar mentality of Lenin was no secret to those familiar with the history of the Russian revolutionary movement. It had been revealed quite clearly by the controversies of 1903-1904. Any one who will take the trouble to read his writings of those early days, and compare them with his writings and speeches as head of the Soviet regime in Russia, will be able to see how the man of State has simply been applying the ideas and the formulae of the Bolshevist agitator.

Popular opinion to the contrary, Lenin was not a great scholar. He never was remarkable for scholarship. A close scrutiny of his writings and speeches will reveal extraordinary limitations in this respect. There is none of the flavor of wide and varied learning. Occasionally there is a reference, an allusion, or a citation such as might suggest scholarship, but it is almost invariably suggestive of mere pedantry. He was a ready thinker, but he was neither profound nor original. He wrote a score or more of books, all of them clever, some of them exceedingly so, but in them all there is not a sign of originality or of that profound penetration to the heart of things which marks the philosopher. A specious dialectician, master of every trick of sophistry, indefatigable in industryLenin was all these, but he was not the powerful intellectual figure that he has been represented to be.

While utterly without scruple politically, he was personally a man of exemplary habits and character. Like all great and successful leaders, he commanded the warm and lasting attachment of others. Without underrating his intellectual gifts, it may be said with confidence that his leadership rested upon character, to a greater extent than upon intellectual power. His intellectual gifts were indeed remarkable, within the limitations already described. But his place in history will not be among the world's great and profound thinkers.

We now have something like an explanatory diagram by means of which we are in a position to understand the sequence of events-the policy of the Bolsheviki during the first period of the Revolution, their attitude toward the Provisional Government, their successful conspiracy and coup d'etat, the regime they established and its strangely novel and complicated structure and policies. On the day after his arrival in Petrograd, April 17, Lenin issued a statement of his personal views which was practically a manifesto to his followers. In that statement he insisted that "no concessions, not even the smallest ones, to revolutionary defencism are possible, because war remains predatory and imperialistic owing to the capitalistic

It was quite clear

character of the Government." that the Bolshevist policy was to aim at two objectives, the end of the war so far as Russia was concernedwhether by Russia's defeat or her withdrawal was immaterial-and the overthrow of the "capitalistic" Provisional Government. This latter meant, of course, that they hoped to seize the reins and themselves become masters of the situation. Quickly, Lenin gathered around himself all who were ready to adhere to that policy.

On May 17, just one month after his arrival upon the scene, Lenin was joined by that other remarkable man whose name has become inseparably linked with his. Leon Trotzky, as he chooses to be known in preference to Leon Braunstein, his real name, was born in the Government of Kherson, in 1877, son of Jewish parents of fairly prosperous estate. His father was a merchant of moderate wealth. By the time he was twenty-two years old Trotzky was an active revolutionist. In 1900 he was arrested at Warsaw for his Socialist activities and sentenced to solitary confinement in prison. In 1902 he was exiled to Siberia for four years, but escaped before his term was finished, and, after spending some time abroad, reappeared in Russia and took an active part in the Revolution of 1905. He showed, even then, a re markable capacity for organization and was made

President of the Workmen's Soviet at St. Petersburg

(later Petrograd).

Although he was an ardent Social Democrat, he had refused to identify himself with either the Bolshevist or the Menshevist faction. He regarded himself as the one man in the party who could unite the two factions, and made many ambitious efforts to that end. His personal views were those of the extreme Left, so that he shared most of Lenin's theoretical and tactical ideas and convictions. At the end of the Revolution of 1905 he was arrested and spent a year in prison. Then he was tried and sentenced to lifeexile in northern Siberia. In 1907 he escaped and until the outbreak of the World War in 1914 lived in Vienna, working at journalism. Then he moved on to Paris, working until 1916 for a Socialist paper published in the Russian language.

Expelled from France, for his advocacy of “defeatist" views, he sought to enter Switzerland, but was refused admission. Going to Spain he was once more arrested and imprisoned for a short time. Released at the end of 1916, he set sail with his family for New York, where he arrived early in January, 1917. As soon as the news of the Revolution came in March, he began to make arrangements to leave for Russia. Having openly declared what his intentions were, he was arrested by the British authorities at

Halifax, and, after the most violent and hysterical protest and resistance, was taken from the ship and interned for a month in a camp for war prisoners. There is irony in the fact that his release by the British, against their own officials' reports and recommendations, was at the request of the Kerensky Government, which Trotzky was determined to destroy!

Lenin and Trotzky have had many disputes, and the former has on more than one occasion rather contemptuously derided his colleague's indulgence in florid rhetoric. Nevertheless, in many respects Trotzky is the abler man of the two. Like Lenin, he is a clever dialectician and a dexterous debater rather than a profound thinker. He is a man of more varied and riper scholarship than Lenin, but he lacks the moral simplicity and integrity of his colleague. Men may and will follow him and acknowledge his leadership, but they will not hold him in affection as they hold Lenin. He is inclined to be pompous and arrogant, and is not above the suspicion of nuturing personal ambitions. Yet it is probably true that he has done far more than Lenin to make the Soviet regime what it is, to keep it alive and to make it a power regarded with respect. Where Lenin would have gone on spinning out interminable "these,' Trotzky has grasped the basic problems of actual organization. Where Lenin would have gone on debat