The Prescott daily news., 1917-12-12
kERENSKY WAS TOO
 LEN|ENT WITH FOES
Vim. G. Shepherd Tells of Con- ditiOns in Russia Which Led to Overthrow of the Kerensky Government by BOlsheviki.

ing to put the iron hand on both the radicals and the aristocrats, was that he never paid sufficient attention to the food question in Russia.
 As soon as the revolution was ac- complished Kerensky began to try to spur on the Russian army to activity. While he was doing this the working men, including the railroaders, were striking for shorter hours and for in- creases in pay that amounted in some cases, to 300 per cent. The railroads decreased in deficiency; wood-cutting, on which the railroads are dependent. fell off. The wood boats on the Neva, that carry fuel to the various railroad centers, became fewer and fewer. Transportation became more and more inefficient and food became less and less in Petrograd and the great cen ters, while in the rural districts, where food was plenty, shoes and clothes became scarce for the same reason.
 A hungry and poorly clad, and un- happy civil population was growing behind the lines, while Kerensky, at the front, was making speeches and telling the Russian army that they must fight. At last he got that pitiful little drive at Halitch, when an army composedi considerable parts of Let's, who had once been in the Ger man army and had been taken prison CTS by the Russians, attacked a DOT tion of the front on which there were Let's on the enemy's side. many of whom were willing enough to surren- der. That was a staged drive, and it was all that Kerensky ever got out of his months of work.
 Russia knows now that, if Kerensky had spent those months in tranquiliz- ing the workingmen and peasants of Russia and had organized the fuel supply and the railroads, he might have solved the food problem of Rus sia, to an appreciable extent, and then, with contented civil population be- hind him, he might have turned to the army and spurred it on to battle.
 The plain fact about Russia today is that the people in the big cities are hungry and the people in the villages are suffering for the lack of shoes, clothes and other manufactures.
 Lenine and Trotsky could never have succeeded in Petrograd if the civil population had not been hungry. Last July, in their attempt to take the city, they failed, because the civilian population was against them.
 This November, with a black win ter before them and with food grow ing scarcer and the bread lines grow ing longer. with shoes and clothes al- most impossible to purchase, the civilian population took guns and went into the streets to help the Bolsheviki. 1Ilt uuilEIN huSSlcIS NCit NAAlllS NO agree to any change of government, even to a Bolsheviki government, in the desperate hope tha they might, in some mysterious way, get food and clothes and fuel for the winter.
 Kerensky, with all his talk and his ideals, had not secured for them the necessities of life. After four months of mastery he had done nothing but stir the army to a disastrous activity, and feed them on oratory and pre- cepts. The army was against Ker- ensky for the same reason.
 The 20000,00O soldiers of Russia are not all soldiers. Putting a peas ant or a working man into a soldiers uniform and giving him a gun has not made him a military man; he remains the same peasant or the same work ingman, with the difference that now he is a peasant or workingman with gun. It is this citizen with a gun, whose family is hungry, who has over thrown Kerensky. This citizen who fears that the land may be divided while he is at the front, who knows that his wife and children are going about either poorly clothed or hungry and that their sufferings this winter will be greater than ever before, has turned on Kerensky. The Bolsheviki promise him bread and peace.