MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
T. PETERSBURG remains always in my memory as a S lonely city, striving in vain to live up to its own vast scale. That scale was set by the Neva, widest and swiftest of all town-rivers, which, after rumbling under the Troitzky Bridge, swelled out into a great estuary dwarfing the- quays and palaces which line its banks. At midnight in June it would still swirl under a faint sun, and on December afternoons at two o'clock the lamps were lit upon their wooden trestles and the horse-trams would creep slow and black across the wide untidy surface of the ice. The depression which this city caused me was due perhaps to the circumstance that I at the time was passing through the gloomy period of my later 'teens, and Russia at the moment was still aching from the wounds of her Japanese defeats and the abortive revolutionary movement which ensued. My elders were more optimistic. Anarchism, they felt, had seen its day; Russia was on the road towards a wider liberalism. Under a gentle Tsar and a strong Prime Minister, with the assistance of a Duma which was daily becoming better educated in its own responsibilities, Russia could evolve into a vast community of peasant- proprietors and enjoy a period of peace, prosperity and concord.
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