My very good friend, the traveler, who was coming slowly around the world, wrote to me from Japan that he had picked up a gift for me, a rare and curious gift. I tried to imagine what it might be. A vase? A print or a dainty painting? Some bit of sculptured beauty? I knew my friend, and I knew that he loved lovely things; but "No," he said when he got home, "it is not a work of art. It's a story, an idea, a truth, perhaps. I don't know." And he gave it to me, as I give it to you for all it is worth. "One quiet night in Tokio," he began, "I passed the whole evening and the dark part of the morning with an elder statesman of Japan. And he talked; they do sometimes. And I listened, as I can, you know. So I heard things. I heard many things that shine like tiny lights for me now in the darkness of the East, stars in the canopy of the ages. I guided the old man. I asked him questions. When I found him willing to answer, I put to him, one by one, all the questions that all my journeyings in Asia had left bleaching on my mind. "They know some answers in the East. They know in their bones some things that we of the West have n't even got into our heads-not yet. It's experience, race wisdom. They are ahead, not behind, us, and Í for one could not learn by mere hearing all the lessons my wise old man of the East was ready to teach me that night. "And one of these, one of the ideas he offered me in vain, the most curious of the thoughts he dug up out of the graves of his ancestors, is this that I am passing on to you. "Toward dawn, when the world was gone to sleep and he and I were alone together in the dimness, I asked him why the Chinese were so honest and the Japanese so dishonest. I put it more politely. 66 'Why is it,' I said, 'that the Chinese are such gentlemen? Even their business men are men of honor. Their word is good, so good that they write no contracts, and no one asks them for a bond. Why is it that the Chinese are thus, and why is it that the Japanese arenot thus?' "The elder statesman looked at me long and wondering. "Don't you understand that?" he asked. 'Don't you, really? It 's simple, you know. It is very simple. ""The Chinese have no government. They are an old people, very, very old, and they have relics of the past. They have the forms of government, but the substance is gone. It is rotted away. The corruption which you see the beginnings of in our younger governments has wormed away the ancient government of China. The officials are corrupt, the ruling class, the judges, too. ""There are no courts in China; not in your sense, not in our sense. No one in China would think of going to a judge for justice. Everybody knows that the highest bidder wins the verdict. A contract is therefore no use. No written contract has been of effect in China for centuries, for so long that-you see, do you not? "No? Well, but you see, don't you, that business had to go on? Men must trade. Agreements have to be made and met. The Chinese had to find some way to exchange goods now and in the future, to promise and to deliver. Therefore, since there was no government, no fair umpire, to pass upon and enforce agreements, since there were no courts to trust, the Chinese had to trust one another. So they did. But this meant that they had to become trustworthy. So they did. They developed a virtue-honesty-to meet the case. With no force to back a promise, they had to have honor.' 'And the Japanese?' I prompted gently. 'Oh, the Japanese.' The elder statesmen smiled. 'We modern peoples have up to now what you might call pretty good government. We, too, are old, we Japanese, but we are not so old as the Chinese. We are behind them, just as some other peoples are behind us. Our courts are, humanly speaking, honest. Our business men feel they can trust them; therefore they do. They leave honor to the courts. They draw contracts carefully, with the intention of appealing against them tohis honor, the judge.' And after Lenine? BY ERNESTINE EVANS DRAWINGS BY JO DAVIDSON Some morning we shall open our newspapers to learn that Lenine is dead. Aside from Trotzky, Krassin, Chicherin, and a few others, we know surprisingly little of the men who might, singly or in a group, carry on the leadership of Soviet Russia. This paper affords a more intimate glimpse into the Bolshevik family album. We were fortunate to have Jo Davidson, the eminent sculptor, at Genoa to sketch some of these Russians.-THE EDITOR. HE pity is, Beletsky is dead: the Bolsheviks killed him in the winter of 1918. The little old man sat out his last days in the damp cellar of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, and then they wasted him who above all others could have served posterity as assistant historian of the Russian Revlution. He had the facts. Beletsky was head of the Okhrana, the czar's special political police, the ablest head it ever had. He was the enemy of the Revolution. He was also its most dispassionate student, the calmest judge of its servants. If they had let him live, he could have answered many questions which vex men to-day in Russia and without. I would rather have his answer than any other's to that most repeated question, "Whose hand will guide Russia when Lenine is dead?" Beletsky knew and judged men. There were revolutionists he laughed at, those he despised, and those he feared and respected, though his lifework was to whip and hound them all, study their speeches and books, unseal their intimate letters, and watch their actions as Fabre watched the bees. He often knew them better than they knew one another, these revolutionists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionists, anarchists. His archives held their records; there the "comrades" were accounted, the false, the backsliders, the neurotic, the weak, as well as the adamantine ones, incorruptible rebels. From among all these he knew where to choose his spies and agents-provocateurs. Some he respected and never thought of choosing. My friend Alexander Semyonovich saw him in his cell one night not long after his arrest. Beletsky had sent hundreds of men to that very cell in the years before he himself stood on its puddly floor. He had a quiet scholarly demeanor, interrupted by little spurts of gusty enthusiasm; not enthusiasm either, but conviction. My friend talked with him about the hurly-burly at Smolny and chanced to speak of Kamenev, who was then prominent in party councils. Kamenev's real name is Lev Borisovich Rosenfeld, and at that time rumor was about Petrograd that one Rosenfeld had been discovered to be among the czar's agents. Beletsky spoke up, described that Rosenfeld, another man altogether, described him with scorn. Even a Beletsky could feel that the spy's trade leaves a snail's filthy trail |