the seeds of sedition broadcast. revolution is at once a habit And the great majority of and a creed? No chance at these intruders is of Jewish all. And the Government, if blood. They are precisely the it is to restore happiness to a men, bred naturally to be much-tried country, to bring Bolsheviks, who should be back the sanity of judgment thrust out of a civilised State. which we used to be told was The true policy for Englishmen the characteristic of English is to send away, without ruth labour, must first purge the or pity, the aliens who have land of those evil-minded infound a footing in our cities. truders who came hither to We have not the courage to corrupt and to destroy. do this. Instead we welcome the rebel with open arms; and who dare assert that we do not lavish unemployment pay upon him, if he have not the luck to find profitable work at once? And every day the number of own unemployed grows larger and larger! Truly those who conduct the affairs of this country seem fit for Bedlam. And the policy of admitting Russian Jews into England with a careless freedom seems the more deeply criminal, because at a vast expense we have already established in Palestine a home for Zionists. Zionism, indeed, has but one excuse. It might be hoped to draw off the worst of the Jews from England, and thus relieve us of an intolerable burden. It has done nothing of the kind. While, on the one hand, Palestine is asked to suffer for our misplaced generosity, the influx into England is increased. And our latest visitants are trained, one and all, in the worst school of Bolshevism. What chance, therefore, has the simpleminded man of asserting himself against the wiles and the cunning of those for whom There is a certain irony in the fact that at the very time when Bolshevism seems to dominate the workers of Great Britain, Bolshevism is perishing in the land of its ill-omened birth. Though travellers have brought us back many false tales, though politicians have converted Russian misery into a mirror wherein they might detect the reflection of their own half-baked ideals, Lenin's passionate appeal for capital has shown his cruelty and fanaticism in a yet darker light. All the blood which he has shed in cold brutality has been shed in vain. In a spasm of hate he and his dirty hirelings have killed the bourgeoisie, and now, if only it were possible, he would welcome back to life those whom he tortured and slew. In England alone is he still worshipped-worshipped by the extremists, whose pockets he has filled, and by the moderates, who compete with the extremists in sheer alarm lest the tail of labour should wag the dog. The British Government, unwilling completely to alienate the Labour vote, alone of all Governments has recognised the Soviets, and has made an infamous treaty of commerce with the ineffable Lenin. And now, having thoroughly disgraced itself, it attempts to mitigate the wrong which it has done by publishing a ponderous white book about Russia, under the pompous, unmeaning title of Report (Political and Economic) of the Committee to Collect Information on Russia.' We know not whether this publication is an act of penitence or the result of departmental indiscipline. Whatever it may be, it is far less effective than a definite refusal to treat with Krassin would have been. And now that it has come to us, it is merely a quarry from which everybody must dig the facts out for himself with his own pick. We have never understood why the Government should make its books, whether white or blue, wholly unreadable. Their very shape and form speak loudly against them, and their openly assumed impartiality deprives them of meaning. The report upon Russia might have been drawn up by an automaton. Its masses of ill-digested facts will convey little or nothing to those whom it should be the Government's aim to enlighten and persuade. What is wanted is not so much the facts themselves, thrown down anyhow, but a vigorous summary, based upon the facts. As it is now, the report speaks only to the industrious converted. The class which we want to reach, the class bemused by foreign propaganda and bribed by foreign gold, will never see the white book, and would not understand it if it did. It needs a pamphlet, easily handled and instantly understood-a summary and an argument, not a mere mass of badly-arranged evidence. A country which is the victim of universal suffrage must stoop to conquer, and unless the Government can better its method of instruction, it might as well suppress its white books altogether. However, interpreting the language of officialism, we can seize a clear enough impression of a depleted country and of industrial dissolution. The removal of the hated bourgeoisie by the customary method of murder has deprived Russia of the brains which might restore it to sanity and prosperity. The class hatred, advocated also in this country, has been carried to its logical result in Russia-a result of death and starvation. The Bolsheviks have done their work efficiently. They have converted the great country of Russia into a desert, and they are further than ever from calling it peace. Nor did they arrive at their successful devastation without foresight and a settled intention. They hoped to achieve the worst, even before the war. A small and narrow body of doctrinaires, who accepted the words of the primitive savage, Marx, as the words of truth, already dominated a mass of ignorant workmen, to whom Marx was wholly unintelligible. They dominated the mass not by the gospel they preached, but by promises made, more easily made than kept. They "offered peace to the army, land to the peasants, and the control of industry to the industrial worker." What more was there to promise? And what wonder is it that, when the moment of conflict arrived, the fanatical leaders were in command of a docile, well-disciplined army? Thus the Bolsheviks grasped the power, which they have held ever since, to the undoing of Russia. The autocracy of one man was exchanged for the more dangerous autocracy of a malignant minority. The Bolsheviks seized the existing organisation, and established an Extraordinary Commission, whose purpose it was to crush all opponents. The method of this Commission was plain and summary. "We are no longer waging war against separate individuals," wrote Latsis, then its president; we are exterminating the bourgeosie as a class. Do not seek in the dossier of the accused for proofs as to whether he opposed the Soviet Government by word or deed. The first question that should be put is to what class he belongs, of what extraction, education, and profession. These questions should decide the fate of the accused. Herein lies the meaning and the essence of the Red Terror." 66 The end and purpose of that Terror were to annihilate all men with brains or training, men who had mastered their craft or who understood their profession. The result was inevitable, and was (or might have been) foreseen. The blind followers of Marx and the manual toilers made a useless combination. The Government of Lenin and Trotsky was incompetent for any other work than the work of destruction. It could neither feed nor clothe the citizens, nor could it help them to feed or clothe them selves. It touched nothing whose failure it did not ensure. Its nationalisation of industry should prove an effective warning to other fanatics. Of 4000 undertakings upon which it laid its paralysing hands, onehalf speedily perished. In 1920 it was admitted that 1,000,000 operatives were at work, between one-third and one-fifth of the numbers which were active in production in 1914. The accession of the Bolsheviks to power was marked not only by the decline of industry, but of universal shortage of food. The people found itself, under the beneficent auspices of Lenin, on the verge of starvation. They could not satisfy their hunger on the dry bones of Karl Marx, a Hebrew pedant. "The process of disintegration," says the white book, "following the revolution, the deterioration of railway transport, and the decline of industry, leading to the separation of town from country, are largely party were ready to support a policy of "direct action," lest the amiable Trotsky should be foiled of his victory over Poland! It would be a comedy, were it not the bitterest tragedy known to history. And the ignorant men who direct the counsels of the working classes seem ready to rush blindly upon ruin themselves, if only they can indulge the ancient grudge they bear capitalism. Never has there been a clearer exposure of communism, which pretends to divide up, share and share alike, the good things of life, and which ends inevitably in starvation, because it can produce nothing that is worth dividing. responsible for the shortage of leaders of our own Labour food supplies in the towns. The suffering thus caused has been considerably augmented by administrative incompetence on the part of the Soviet food organisations." Here is what Here is what used to be called an "objectlesson," which our own Bolsheviks would do well to ponder. They will not ponder it, because they are as careless as was Lenin himself of the future of their country. And the failure of the bureaucracy would still further enlighten them, if, indeed, they were capable of enlightenment. Here is the picture which presents itself in the Central Food Organisations: "Floods of papers, responsible officials overwhelmed with correspondence, hundreds of clerks, bored, without initiative, looking upon their work as a burden, displaying extraordinary indifference towards visitors." Meanwhile the people go unclad and starving. And the triumph of Bolshevism is complete. Not only in the shortage of food has Bolshevism triumphed. It has triumphed also in the shortage of fuel. In the winter of 1919 as many thousands died of cold as died of hunger. Hundreds of wooden houses were torn down in Moscow and Petrograd to provide the poor devils with warmth. And they were not members of the bourgeoisie who suffered. The most of the bourgeoisie were already dead. It was the members of the sacred proletariat who died of cold and hunger. Yet the He Lenin and Trotsky cannot but recognise the havoc which they have wrought upon the decimated community. They attempt to repair the results of their evil-doing each in his own way. Lenin throws up the sponge altogether, and confesses in effect the complete failure of communism. sends out an S.O.S. to the capitalists to come and rescue him from the ruin in which he has involved the whole of Russia. Trotsky prefers a more savage method of action. He admits that "Russia is a starving country, and suffering from terrible collapse of transport and the food administration." And then, in a passage of confession and not of penitence, he declares: "The growth of civilisation is measured by the productivity of human labour, and every new form of social relationship must pass the test of this doctrine. It is impossible to build up Socialism on decreased production. Every social organisation is at bottom an organisation of labour. And if our new organisation of labour leads to decreased productivity, then, by this very fact, the Socialist society which is being built up is inevitably on its way to ruin, however we may twist and turn, and whatever means of salvation we try to improvise." These are the simple words of truth. And as Trotsky states the truth, and refuses to be influenced by it, so his followers, the extreme leaders of British Labour, are willing to greet even the starvation of others as a triumphant vindication of their ideas. Can human folly be carried a single inch further? But Trotsky, loving power far more than ideas, has found a way out, or thinks he has. "He reminded his audience," so the white book tells us, "that a long series of wars had hitherto decided the fate of revolution. They had completed one chapter of war. They must prepare for the next chapter. Without economic restoration they would be unable to hold their own in it. It was therefore essential that the workers and peasants should co-operate whole-heartedly to improve production, and a widespread propaganda should be begun to that end. To achieve these economic aims it would be necessary to unite compulsion to moral suasion as successfully as they had done in the Red Army. Compulsory measures did not frighten the masses of workers and peasants, who saw in them their support; while Soviet propaganda, so successful during the war, must show them that they would be unable to escape from the precipice of economic breakdown, on the edge of which they now found themselves, without establishing new forms of State unity." Thus Trotsky throws up the sponge, and with a command to his followers, the obvious truth of which none will attempt to refute, that "they must tell the peasants that it was impossible to continue freezing and dying of starvation indefinitely," he proclaims a policy of enforced labour. We should like to see the aspect of our own workers, who worship Trotsky as a god, if they were compelled to work under the lash, or in the master's words, "to unite compulsion to moral suasion." With one accord they would lay down their tools, and resolve, in defiance of Trotsky, to "die of starvation indefinitely." As the Bolsheviks have proved themselves unable to feed or clothe the Russian people, so they cannot educate the Russian children. They take them from their parents almost as soon as they are born, to make them the starveling slaves of the State, and there the matter ends. In the schools there are not enough |