(cab-drivers) had a Union; they were also represented in the
Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organised, and
refused tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which
read, "No tips taken here-" or, "Just because a man has to make his
living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a
tip!"

At the Front the soldiers fought out their fight with the officers,
and learned self-government through their committees. In the
factories those unique Russian organisations, the Factory-Shop
Committees, [*] gained experience and strength and a realisation of
[* See Notes and Explanations]
their historical mission by combat with the old order. All Russia was
learning to read, and _reading-_politics, economics, history-because
the people wanted to _know...._ In every city, in most towns, along the
Front, each political faction had its newspaper-sometimes several.
Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of
organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the
factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted,
burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny
Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons,
car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia
absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And
it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap
fiction that corrupts-but social and economic theories, philosophy,
the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky....

Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle's "flood of French speech" was a
mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches-in theatres, circuses,
school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters,