Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION Saturday, October 4th. I woke with the traveler's familiar strange feeling on finding myself in this trebly famous city. After all I had heard and read of the Empire-shaking happenings in this historic capital, I could not bring myself to acquiesce in the reality of the natural life which is presenting itself. A sentimental novelist somewhere represents the world as standing still because a papyrus found in Egypt demonstrated that the New Testament was a forgery. But H. G. Wells, the great artist of human psychology, grasped the profound truth that the world goes on with its day disturbed not at all by the imminence, but only by the actuality, of a great catastrophe. Yet I could not at first grasp the reality of seeing people going to and from work in the ordinary way in the morning, nor of the visible fact that along the banks of the river and across the bridges the trams were running past my window. Incidentally, I noticed also that a number of trams were drawing behind them flat trolleys loaded up with wood, an example of the efforts which are being made to cope with the needs of the coming winter. The outline of the Kremlin filled the background with the multitudinous golden domes of its beautiful Byzantine architecture. Everythree hours the sacred bells clanged forth in discord, with lingering throbbing overtones, the revolutionary airs of the " Internationale," the sound calling up from the past a symbolic vision of French priests wearing the tricolor sash over their soutanes. I did not get up till after nine, as nights had been somewhat broken of late, and shortly afterward Lit- vinoff's secretary, P , arrived to assist me in putting in operation my lengthy program. We first proceeded to the Health Museum. In the building I was ...