The Birmingham age-herald., 1918-02-21
MEN, WOMEN
 AND THINGS

the most religious land in the world. l Democracy is to me the goal for : which nations should strive. It is at 1 the bottom of the war so far as the allies are concerned. I proudly boast that I am a democrat of democrats and that is why I am going to freely admit that title has 8 fascina tion for me.
 If this had not been true I would not have gone out on Tuesday night to hear plain Mrs. Catherine Darwin, for it was the Princess Radziwill who drew me. Yes, sir. wanted both to see and to hear a real live, sure enough to goodness Russian princess. I dare say if others were equally as truthful it would account for the large crowd which greeted her.
 Did you hear her? If you did you are one of the very few who had that pleasure. Many saw but few heard the noted Russian woman. I was first SOdtOd dpOQL lDC IuluOt6 or the CnuTCH, but when she arose to speak I knew that to remain where I was meant tho loss of the evening. so I got up and marched down to a front seat. Now I both heard and saw her, anu was pleased with her appearance and what she had to say I thought that Colonel Applin was sufficiently serious and that Charles Edward Russell was a bit sombre, but the atmosphere which surrounded them was filled with sweetness and light in comparison with Radziwill as she spoke of her native land.
 I pointed out the fact that Colonel Applin never joked, and that Dr. Rus sell never smiled. but the princess was tragic in her sorrow over a Rus sia which she said was dead. Her manner, her looks, her words had the solemnity of great ecclesiastic who was delivering a funeral oration over the grave of a dead dynasty-and could see the Romanoffs being silently inferred.
 She is the Russian type with which am familiar. She reminded me of a beautiful Russian girl I knew at Zurich, where as student I summered nearly 30 years ago The princess at that time was herself in the first flow- CT of her beautiful young womanhood and so as she stood before me in black, relieved only by the magnificent string of pearls which encircled her neck and fell athwart her heaving bosom. she brought to me memories of the little Russian band of women who had found an asylum in Switzerland.
 It is hard for one who has never met Russians abroad or seen them in their own country or kept up with the his tory of the daring spirits who have braved Czars and flouted public opin- ion and fled to the capitals of Europe to startle and shock the conventional by their mode of life and freedom of
  ment among the intellectuals has meant in sowing Russia with seeds of discontent or fertilizing her with dreams of future greatness.
 
 Perhaps as a popular lecture the one delivered by the princess was not a success, being in part due to her in- abi1ity fn nrtiCI11ate claar1y cnaok English without hesitation; and yet to me it gripped very much tighter than many that were delivered with ease and generously applauded ut soon forgotten. The lecture to me was not the thing. it was the woman. Nearly any cultivated person can get up a fairly interesting address, but few women who have ever stood be- fore a Birmingham audience have lived lives checkered with interest to the degree that her eventful life has been.
 I do not mean that her talk was from it, for it was the story of broken hopes, of vanished dreams, of buried aspirations. You could catch the tears in her voice as she related how all that was best in Russia was being trampled under foot by design ing German agents whose business 1t was to wreck and ruin and stay for awhile the Slav's chance to realize on his vast potentialities.
 Russian women have never feared to remove tyrants, and somehow I sensed that as the princess spoke, if she had been in Kerensky's place there would have been no wavering or temporizing with Trotzky and Lenine, but that she would have made short shrift of them and their wretched propaganda to lead her beloved country into the hands of the crafty Teutons. I did not blame her for the bitterness with which she spoke of them as traitors and of the untold shame they had brought upon the nation.
 moved me so much as the fact that she had given her best, her only son. on the altar of her country, and now that he had died in vain. she yet could let America know that at heart Rus sia was true and some day would re- !pay her for the sacrifices she was making for the freedom of humanity