_is hardly to be supposed that! the Soviet will be allowed to hang the. Petrograd priests and pro. fessors for the enormous crime of daring to protest against the plundering of the churches without an effort being made from abroad to save the victims, especially to save. Patriarch Tikhon from the grim farce of Soviet criminal proceedings. But neither is it much to be expected that such efforts will have any success, And if it be expedient that any man should die for the people, these poor priests and professors will very likely do far more for Russia by their deaths than they could in life. The revulsion of feeling in! Russia in favour of the Church 1s probably the greatest danger the! Soviet has to fear and the quasi. judicial murder of these men will! intensify it ten-fold. No one be-! lieves that the treasures torn from the Church will go to famine relief, nor will, until the Bolsheviks can! explain what they have done with the enormous gold reserves which Russia possessed when they seized power. These treasures, there can be little doubt, will be used to bolster up the Soviet's authority until it can cajole foreign Govern-! ments to grant credits for! the same purpose. If only this! device can be defeated, the days of Sovietism are numbered.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.