Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1918 — Influence of Good Sense Always Made Itself Felt In Guiding the Russians [ARTICLE]

Influence of Good Sense Always Made Itself Felt In Guiding the Russians

“Next to free speech and free listening, free action Is a popular pastime,” writes William G. Shepherd in an article on distracted Russia published in Everybody’s. “Anarchists have seized palaces and newspaper offices and automobiles and paintings and even wealth. But in the midst of this apparent anarchy, this lack of government, there is always—and this is an astonishing fact that has Impressed the members of the American commission and all the other foreign statesmen who have come to Russia since the revolution—a checking influence of what we in the United States call ‘common sense.’ “There is always somebody in a meeting who offsets wild speeches; somebody in a crowd who gives a matter a second thought and offsets and checks the man who wishes to act without thinking. There is an unexpected hardheadedness about even the mobs. The country districts of Russia, thousands of its little towns, villages and cities, were being governed, three months after the revolution, by public opinion and common sense alone —and astonishingly well governed. “But all this makes a weird world, full of weird happenings. “Anything can happen In Russia these days. But the point I am making is that in Russia the influence of common sense has Always made itself felt from the first day of the revolution, and the council of workmen and soldiers was a concrete embodiment of this characteristic at a time in Russia when peaceful anarchy ruled; when one opinion or theory was as good as another and when there was a machine gun behind every theory.”