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The pioneer of modern culture among Russian Jews, the founder of Neo-Hebraic literature, spent his life in the midst of a realm of darkness, shunned like an outcast, appreciated by a mere handful of sympathizers. It was only after his death that he was crowned with laurels, when the intellectuals of Russian Jewry were beginning to press forward in close formation.

It is what I had in mind when I spoke of the surgeon contracting the disease. We German intellectuals know what war means; we are used to things like this." Suddenly he put out his hand. "Good-bye." "I will go with you!" I exclaimed. But he protested that would embarrass him greatly. I would please to stay, and see the picture; he would be interested later on to hear my opinion of it.

Meetings were forbidden by officials and broken up by soldiers and police; newspapers were suppressed, as of old; labor-unions, and even the unions of the Intellectuals, were ruthlessly persecuted and treated as conspiracies against the state. All this and more was true and discouraging.

Although backward from the point of view of progress and politics, this country produced the "intellectuals" who form something unique in our present civilization: in essence, they are anti-bourgeois.

Knowledge would gain by leaps and bounds. There would be a cross-fertilization of cultures. As things now stand, half the intellectuals of this world are writing about matters which, unbeknown to themselves, have already been treated by the other half. One would think that Commerce, which has broken down geographical barriers, might have done the same to political ones. Far from it!

One would fain believe that his ardent love of peace and bitter arraignment of the madness of war had some effect. They have undoubtedly spread pacific sentiments in the broad circles of intellectuals who read Erasmus, but unfortunately the history of the sixteenth century shows little evidence that such sentiments bore fruit in actual practice.

At a little village outside Kirk Kilisse a young civil servant, an official of the Foreign Office, spoke of the war whilst we ate a dish of cheese and eggs. "It is a war," he said, "of the peasants and the intellectuals. It is not a war made by the politicians or the soldiers of the staff. That would be impossible. In our nation every soldier is a citizen and every citizen a soldier.

I told her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of tallness was or was not an illusion.

The latter corresponds to the "intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling classes; whilst the former the instinctive, the spontaneous, the common-sense element dominates the man in the street. It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a sort of sublimated public opinion minus the opinion of the intellectuals.

To the same point Thomas Beaven quotes the ever memorable John Hales, who, in his golden remains, writes in the following manner: "The love and favour, which it pleased God to bear our fathers before the law', so far prevailed with him, as that without any books and writings, by familiar and friendly conversing with them, and communicating himself unto them, he made them receive and understand his laws, their inward conceits and intellectuals being, after a wonderful manner, figured as it were and charactered by his spirit, so that they could not but see and consent unto, and confess the truth of them.