Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/15

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Introduction
11

If Russia be speedily restored to the family of nations and real intercourse with her be again established, the result will be, in all human probability, a surprising approximation of Russian methods to those of the rest of Europe. Let us hope it may also mean a quicker stride of European democracies outside Russia in the path of social progress and economic salvation along which Russia has attempted, perhaps too rapidly for success, to advance.

For myself, the result of our investigations is summed up in this: I am not hostile to the Russian Revolution which the tyrannous regime of the Czars made necessary and inevitable; but I am utterly opposed to the coup d'état of the Bolsheviki, as I should be to the seizing of power by any small minority of the people; for out of this action has sprung a large part of the misery the unhappy people of Russia endure.