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Rh foreground. He is the dumb inarticulate actor whom nobody understands, whom hitherto everybody has neglected, but in whose name every one now claims to speak, whose interests every one claims to defend, because all feel that on him depends the ultimate success or failure of the revolution. (g) In both countries the revolution begins with the same experiment of a centralized Parliament superimposed upon a centralized bureaucracy, doomed to end in failure, because it is without any root in the past, and cannot meet the needs of the people. And in both Parliaments we hear the same palaver, the same speeches, earnest yet hollow, sincere yet with the ring of rhetoric. In those long speeches of the first Duma on the abolition of the death penalty, do we not hear some echo of "Sea-green" Robespierre, who resigned his position as a judge because he could not muster the courage to inflict a death penalty, and who yet did not hesitate to send thousands of his opponents to the guillotine, and to wade to power through those same "rivers of blood" which his Russian imitators are prepared to cross! (h) And do we not see the same strange contrast between the tragic magnitude of events,