an old ex-officer, pointed out a strip of yellow wood that ran around the ship.
"That moulding is of best mahogany," he whispered to us. "It cost twenty-five thousand rubles, but these damned Bolsheviks are too lazy now to keep it polished, so they painted it yellow. In my day a sailor was a sailor; he knew that his job was to scrub and polish, and he tended to his job. If he didn't we knocked him down. But the devil is loose among them now. Think of it! On this very yacht belonging to the Czar himself, ordinary seamen sit about making laws for managing the ships, the fleet and the country. And they don't stop there. They talk about managing the world. Internationalism and democracy they call it, but I call it downright treason and insanity."
There in brief was the issue between the old regime and the new. In the old order, discipline and control were superimposed from above; in the new, they proceeded from the men themselves. The old was a fleet of officers, the new a fleet of sailors. In the change a new set of values had been created. Now the polishing of the sailor's wits upon democracy and internationalism had higher rating than polishing the brass and mahogany.
The second index of the temper of the new fleet came to us as we climbed the gangway of the Polar Star, where Rasputin and his associates once had their fling. Here Bessie Beatty, the American correspondent, was gravely informed that the presence
