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it is a blessing, let the whole world enjoy it. If Trotski is a greater tyrant than the Czar, let him meet a similar doom; if Lenin is worse than Wilhelm, let the Russians deport him.
If, as Sasonoff tells us, all the shops of Moscow are empty and all the prisons full; if the peasants complain they are worse off under the tyranny of the committees than under the single employer of yore; if, as the Swiss pamphleteers inform us, Bolshevism has meant the blind destruction of forests, crops, raw materials, and a calamitous exodus from the cities; if under the Soviets Russia is without bread, commerce, manufactures, or freedom, what an invaluable lesson for other would-be Bolsheviks!
Why intervene to destroy what is destroying itself? Why, like Gilbert's Mikado, make suicide a capital offence? To destroy Bolshevism from without would only destroy the value of this awful warning. For Bolsheviks would then always say it died of violence, not of its own rottenness.
As it is, they say it has not had a fair chance, that the experiment was made in a country already ruined by the capitalists and their war, a famished country, a country now isolated politically and boycotted economically. They say it was not Bolshevism that brought the bankruptcy of Russia, but the bankruptcy of Russia that brought Bolshevism. And as a matter of fact what is the use of pointing to Russia's disorganisation and destitution? The whole Continent groaneth and travaileth. You cannot spend £40,000,000,000 to destroy another £40,000,000,000, and denude Europe of ten million able-bodied producers and then have peace and plenty.
According to Gorki, whoso slow conversion to Bolshevism makes his evidence all the more valuable, Bolshevism is not the scourge it first seemed, but a sincere striving for "the freedom and beauty of life." And so it is. Who can object to a Constitution, one of whose first articles declares that "He who will not work shall not eat"? True, there seems a somewhat crude interpretation of work. I have spent weeks of study to find out the truth about Bolshevism. Is not that work—and useful work?
The Bolsheviks, it appears, set artists to clean out lavatories: still we sent Epstein to the trenches. They despise professors and set up street universities in the shape of posters of information. A crazy idea! say the critics. I am inclined to think it an improvement on the posters of our picture palaces.
I am far from supposing Bolshevism was born perfect; in fact, it is still in travail, a revolution still in evolution, a birth that is half an abortion, a chaos of capitalism and socialism, of idealism and materialism, of wisdom and folly. But the
