strange to the uneducated mind. For the same reason the methods of
surmounting the difficulty differ in many respects and are characteristic
of each party.

The Conservative Intellectuals of Russia early realized the necessity of
meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing to
him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an all-suffering
motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a powerful appeal upon the
imagination, for a long time superseding and forcing into the background
the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled longing for more land. The
ideology of a perfect monarchy is so simple and its shortcomings so easily
attributable to dishonesty of officials, that it answered the peasant's
thoughts as long as he was not able to see the folly of distinguishing
between the system and its realization, but separated in his mind the image
of his loving monarch from the cruel reality of everyday life as he still
distinguishes between the faith and the priest. The great mistake of all
conservatives is that they seek to bring about a state of perfect justice
by improving only the quality of the ruling body without changing the
conditions of life of the ruled mass. Yet even so the Conservatives had
quite a following among the peasants up to the time of the revolution of
1917 and in a way may still have a future before them.

The Octoberists find no support in the masses and do not make any serious
attempt to gain it. They frankly acknowledged themselves as the party of
industry and trade, having no wider interests at heart than the maintenance
of order and law throughout the country. Their leaders were forced into
a revolutionary attitude only at the time when there was danger of a
universal collapse of Russia if the tsar's government persisted, and they
may be forced to join in a counter-revolution, if their interests are again
endangered. Their ideology is that of a capitalistic class and their power