parison to the wholesale deterioration of 40,000 miles of roadbed and the rotting away of the machinery in thousands of mines.
It is obvious that all social reforms on a national scale are wholly impossible under economic conditions like these, where the industrial population has been reduced to a third or fourth of what it was and where the wage-earners that remain are wretchedly clothed and are happy when they have a starvation ration of black bread—to say nothing of any other food. Reforms of any substantial kind whatever for 100,000,000 people cost colossal sums of money, and occasional "model" institutions in a vast country are but a mockery serving to demonstrate the utter inadequacy and futility of what is being accomplished.
Far from moving forward we can be mathematically certain that every fundamental institution is falling back in Russia today—especially when we remember that the liberal Zemstvos, or provincial councils, under the old régime, had made a considerable beginning in certain directions.
Yet the Bolshevist propagandists and their "liberal" accomplices have the audacity to assert that vast and substantial reforms are being carried out in "art," "science," "education" and "culture." Though no foundation whatever for any of these assertions has been produced they have been so often repeated that the impression has become widespread that there must be "something" in them.
The most notorious of the mythical "reforms" being reported by the Bolshevists and their friends is the reform of the schools and the supposed good treatment
