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THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
37

I hate your intelligentsia," said the former to a lady. "Why?" she asked. "Because," was the answer, "because of their meekness. Why are they so Christian? Why cannot they hate? They make me sick with their fraternity. A student came to us the other day and preached that we are all brothers and must live in peace. How can a man of sense say that he—or that we—must be brothers with all this murderous canaille?"

XV. The Disillusionment.

The truth is that all over Russia the peasants and the workmen are now realising, too late, that by their apathy and ignorance, they had allowed the growing disaffection of a greedy and rapacious bourgeoisie (commercialists) to undermine a benevolent but weakly paternal and disorganised government. And so, after the inevitable fall of their hopelessly inefficient bourgeois-socialist successors—the Kerensky idealists—the way was prepared for the present despots; who have turned their quandam dupes, whom in their own jargon, they had named "wage slaves," into real slaves, working under conditions of forced labour at the bayonet point, without the wages necessary to buy sufficient food.

They now know, to their cost, what "communism" is and they want none of it. They know that "communism" which, as propaganda, is always designed to appeal to the acquisitive and covetous instincts (therefore egoistic and anti-communistic) of those who think they have least to lose and most to gain, but which as actual fact, has deprived them of everything that ever gave a zest to life for the privilege of being the bondsmen of Jews and international revolutionaries.