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Another despatch from Sovietland corroborated the fact that Trotsky had retired to his country palace, but authoritatively stated that he had been ordered by doctors to rest for two months, owing to "weakness of both body and spirit, the result of a mysterious malady developing during the past three months, whose marked symptom was a wasting, intermittent fever." This despatch inferred that the rumors in Russia about Trotsky were more numerous than those received by the outside world, and that the political dispute of which Trotsky is the center, was "so hot as to mislead some of the Communists themselves." Léon Trotsky, son of a Jewish farmer of the Ukraine, is 44 years of age. At nine he went to Odessa and studied at St. Paul's High School, where, says he: "I displayed great diligence in my studies and always was first in my class." He does not appear to have sponsored Marxism for any personal grievance and was, according to himself, slow to embrace it at all. It is true that beginning with Jan. 18, 1898, he served various terms of imprisonment amounting in all to ten years. "It was in prison that I finally became converted to the theory of Marx." He was a Social Democrat. After the Brussels Conference of 1903, when the Socialist Convention split to become known as Bolshevik* and Menshevik Parties, he joined the Mensheviki. "As soon as Menshevism began to assume the character of a tactical movement. . . I broke with the Mensheviki and remained outside both factions," he related. After Bloody Sunday, Jan. 9, 1905, he seems to have become an ardent Bolshevik and to have worked hard for the revolution. At the outbreak of the War he fled to Germany and was imprisoned by the Kaiser for writing a seditious pamphlet. He subsequently escaped to France, was expelled and fled to Spain, was again expelled and in January, 1917, he went to the U. S. and lived for several months in Manhattan. Later in the same year, he returned to Russia, took a prominent part in the Bolshevik Revolution.
* Bolshevik, from bolshinstvó, meaning majority; Menshevik, from menshinstvtó, meaning minority.