No matter what promises the Bolsheviks enter into with Great Britain, they will not abandon the active prosecution of their plans for revolutionizing the world. These plans are an essential part of their theory, and for us to expect the Communists to give them up would be like the Communists expecting us to give up our theory and practice of ministerial responsibility.

The Bolsheviks hold that mankind is divided not into nationalities but into two classes, the Proletariat and the Parasites. Such of them as have had some education admit, however, that unfortunately in the benighted capitalistic States outside Russia many of the proletariat are at present working as slaves and instruments of the parasitic classes, being drugged and stupefied by patriotism, religion, and a bourgeois education ingeniously designed by the capitalists to make them contented with their servile lot. When these deluded workers have been enlightened they will see that their place is not with the capitalists but with the people. Such, in short, is the Bolshevik contention.

Carlyle describes in a well-known passage how a dozen French peasants are taken by their Government, put into gay clothes, armed, drilled, and sent out to kill a dozen German peasants who have been put through a similar process by their war-lords. A Bolshevik official, who greatly appreciates this piece of literature, told me once that the Communist idea is to arm all the peasants and workers of the world, but to make them then turn their rifles on their respective oppressors, the kings and capitalists of their own lands, and, having abolished these, to shake hands all round in token of perpetual peace.

This simple theory has gripped the Bolshevik mind in Russia, as if it were a Divine revelation, and its ready acceptance is probably due to several conditions peculiar to that country—the simplicity and ignorance of the people, the ascetic and mystical traits in their national character, their misgovernment in the past, their profound love of peace, their sufferings in the war, and their conviction, implanted and fostered by an able but mendacious propaganda, that the workers of the world are following in their footsteps, though their efforts have not, as yet, been crowned with quite the same success. Another condition peculiar to Russia is the feebly developed nationalistic sense of the people. Most of them have as little idea of a patria as the average Gaul had in the time of Cæsar, and I have heard of many Russians who did not know that they themselves were Russian, their imagination having never travelled beyond the confines of their native province.

Knowing the existence of this state of things, I was not surprised, consequently, when we were captured at Krasnoyarsk, to find that the soldiers of the Red Army were indifferent as to our nationality, and were only anxious to know which of their two categories we belonged to. We were never once asked for our passports, such tokens of nationality being regarded as antique lumber, which all mankind was throwing on the scrap-heap as fast as it could along with crowns and croziers. There was pained surprise when the private soldiers in our party did not, on being released by capture from their military “servitude,” join their natural friends the Bolsheviks joyfully and at once, but remained voluntarily with their natural enemies, us, their officers.

The Irish soldiers amongst us were not treated differently from the others, because the Bolsheviks who captured us had never heard of Ireland, but later I found that the leading Bolsheviks were favourably disposed towards the Irish, whom they regarded as disinterested agitators with a genuine sense of grievance and with a considerable practice in agitation since the days of Parnell.

These Communist leaders expect much help from disgruntled nationalities outside Russia; hence the support they give to nationalist movements abroad, and the great sympathy they express for them in every issue of their newspapers. But if those movements succeeded, the Bolsheviks would be the first to undermine the resultant nationalist Governments in order to clear the way for Soviets. Many similar instances of dishonesty on the part of the Bolsheviks could be given. They manifest, for instance, great sympathy with strikers abroad, yet they not only crush strikers at home, but, owing to their complete control of the Press, are able to cover them with moral obloquy as well, by denouncing them as traitors bought by foreign capitalists. Workmen so accused have no means of publicly refuting these charges. Such a case happened recently when a strike occurred on the Moscow-Kursk railway. They turn a moist eye towards the “enslaved” British workman, yet treat a deserter from the labour army as a deserter from the fighting army at the Front is treated in war-time.

A ring of Soviets all round the world is their ideal, but circumstances have rendered their present policy complex. Though anti-nationalist themselves, they have been assisted in their struggle against Kolchak, Denikin, and the Poles by a nationalist movement among the Russians who saw that practically all the Red Army was Russian, while Kolchak, for example, though professedly nationalist and ultra-Russian, was assisted to such an extent by British, French, Italians, Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, and Letts, that his enterprise was described as an invasion of Russia by a gang of international capitalists.

Lenin knows more about conditions in the outer world than the simple folk who captured us at Krasnoyarsk, but he knows much less than he is given credit for in this country. He is a fanatical believer in his own dogma of internationalism—or, more properly speaking, anti-nationalism and cosmopolitanism—and in the duty incumbent on him of preaching this dogma to all peoples.

In speaking of this man many Englishmen seem to form in their minds the picture of a statesman who will act as they themselves would act if they were in his position. They think that the responsibilities of office must sober and modify him as they would sober and modify an English Socialist. They believe that his extremist utterances are mere popular clap-trap such as an English politician sometimes indulges in for electioneering purposes, that he must “play up” to the impossible demands of his party, but that, when it comes to practical politics, he is bound to display moderation and common sense.

Such Englishmen do not know Lenin. They read their own character into that of the Communist leader, and attribute to him an English mentality and training which he has not got. There is in Lenin and in the whole Communist party a good deal of that inflexibility, narrowness, intolerance, and fanaticism which we associate with the Eastern Church; and I might add, by the way, that if Bolshevism continues in power for a few years longer, it will inevitably become a dead and mummified system, a mechanical, devitalized structure such as I believe official Orthodoxy to be.

The meticulous care which the Bolsheviks take to prevent foreign literature and non-Bolshevik foreigners from disturbing the belief of their neophytes in the Bolshevik faith, reminds one of the care taken by Pobydonostsev, the Procurator of the Most Holy Synod. The mentality in both cases is the same, though the object is different. No mistress of novices in a convent could be more careful than the head of the Extraordinary Commission to prevent bad, breezy men from the outer world from “blowing in” among the innocent novices, and shaking by profane laughter their delicately poised faith. A full description of these minute precautions would be amusing, but it would be too long a digression. What I have said, however, will show what a mistake it would be for us to think that these people can modify their programme. To think so is to attribute to the Bolsheviks the character of an English political party. Bolshevism has been called “inverted Tsarism,” but it might also be described as “inverted Christianity,” for whereas the Founder of Christianity sacrificed Himself for the World, the founders of Bolshevism are, like the first Mohammedans, ready to sacrifice all the rest of the world if it does not accept their creed.

Lenin himself impressed me as having all the characteristics of a fanatical Byzantine monk. He has narrowness, intolerance, asceticism, a fixed idea, and an incapacity to change. Later I came across a similar view of him in Landau-Aldanov’s “Lenin und der Bolschewismus” (Berlin, 1920). The Russian Socialist writer says that “some of the Bolsheviks, and perhaps some of the best of them, have the mentality and the entire psychology of monks. Had he lived some centuries earlier, Lenin himself might have made an excellent Jesuit.” Landau-Aldanov goes on to institute a comparison between the hair-splitting of the Greek theologians at the Œcumenical Council of Constantinople and the hair-splitting of Lenin, Martov, and other Bolshevik ideologues at the Second Congress of the Social Democratic party in August, 1903. He does not strengthen his case, however, by dragging in Captain Pascal, an officer of the French Mission in Moscow and formerly a Catholic priest, who has now become a Bolshevik. “Dostoievsky tells us in one of his novels of an atheist who blew out all the candles in front of his holy ikons, replaced the ikons by the works of anti-Christian philosophers like Buechner and Moleschott, and, having done so, piously lighted the candles again. This expresses exactly what the Reds have done. Yesterday they believed blindly in St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker; to-day they have transferred the same unreasoning faith to Karl Marx; and their scientific superstition of to-day is as childish as was their religious superstition of yesterday.”

Though he has travelled abroad, Lenin has lived, even abroad, in a close revolutionary atmosphere, which is, after all, a very narrowing atmosphere. He brooded over his own ideas, exchanged views with people who were much of the same way of thinking as himself, and entered into controversy only with Mensheviks, Anarchists, and other theorists who are even further removed from the realities of life than he is. His ignorance of conditions in England is therefore very great. His manner of life has deprived his mind of all flexibility, and imparted to his utterances a pontifical character which would not be tolerated for a moment in political circles anywhere outside Russia.

The Russian newspapers are filled daily with interminable dissertations on abstruse socialistic subjects from his pen or from the pens of other prophets of Bolshevism, and the style of these lucubrations bears some resemblance, in respect at least of extreme aridity, to the interminable treatises on obscure theological questions which were popular in Europe during the religious ferment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of quotations from pious divines and from the Early Fathers, they are full of ponderous passages from German professors, who are apparently regarded by the Communists as infallible authorities. And in the same way that some English congregations of the post-Reformation period delighted in sermons lasting three or four hours, so the Bolsheviks delight in endless speeches on abstruse socialistic subjects, of which most of them can understand only very little.

But amid all this confusion and obscurity there remains clear the fixed idea of “internationalism” or anti-nationalism whereof Lenin is the Prophet. He has passed most of his life in poverty and exile on account of it. He is now wading towards it through blood. It would be a mistake, therefore, to think that he will ever really surrender it—though he may promise to do so for the sake of getting locomotives and machinery from us. He has made this perfectly clear in hundreds of speeches and newspaper articles; if we think otherwise, he has a perfect right to say that he has not deceived us, that we have deceived ourselves. He has warned us not only in his public utterances, but by his actions, that he will not keep any promises he makes to capitalist States, and that he will use any methods and accept help from any quarters in order to attain his ends. He accepted help from the Kaiser in 1918 in order to contribute afterwards towards the Kaiser’s overthrow; and he has frequently boasted that when he made peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, and promised to cease his revolutionary propaganda in Germany, he never meant to observe the conditions of that peace and did not observe them in so far as they related to propaganda.

This is not his policy alone, but that of all his party, which admits that it has always acted on it and always will act on it. In his pamphlet on the “Bolshevik Party,” Radek, an authoritative spokesman of the Communists, says that the Bolsheviks supported the agitation for a Duma in 1905, not because they wanted to keep a Duma in existence, but because they were convinced that it would be a ladder which would enable them to reach their goal, and which they could then kick away. The same pamphlet and all the recent literature of the Bolsheviks are full of similar admissions of dishonesty.

After peace was concluded with Esthonia, Lenin said in effect:

We have acknowledged the bourgeois Government of Esthonia. We have given it money and concessions and territory and all the other playthings that a Capitalist State hankers after, because we are perfectly sure of our ability to undermine the foundations on which it stands. We will work silently and tirelessly among its working classes, and it is only a question of time when the whole fabric will come tumbling down. Esthonia is now in the Kerensky stage, but, as surely as sunrise follows darkness, so surely will the Communist stage follow the Kerensky and the Esthonian workers establish a Soviet republic.

It may be taken for granted, therefore, that, no matter what promises Lenin makes, he will not cease to encourage Bolshevik propaganda in the British Empire.

The danger of this propaganda consists in the idea of internationalism which I have explained above, and which might better perhaps be called anti-nationalism or anationalistic class war. This theory enables the Bolsheviks to find accomplices and allies in the most unexpected places outside Russia—in battleships, wireless stations, military barracks, post-offices, consulates, palatial hotels, and mansions. The result is that no one holding a responsible position in a non-Bolshevik country can be sure that he has not in his employ an embittered subordinate, sometimes with a genuine grievance against society and a genuine belief in Communism as a cure for all the ills of the world, but more frequently aggrieved because of a natural incapacity which education does not and cannot remedy. Such a man may feel that his place is with the all-world proletariat and not with the mixture of classes which compose his particular country, so that, if not actually working for the Bolsheviks, he may be quite ready to work for them if the opportunity presents itself.

I know nothing of present conditions in this country (Great Britain) owing to my long absence from it, but this danger is manifest on the Continent, and especially in the countries which lie near Russia. There is a leakage of official information in the Finnish, Scandinavian, and Polish posts, telegraphs and hotels, and even in some of the foreign consulates and legations, where non-Britishers have to be employed. One such case of leakage that I know of was suspected to have taken place in a foreign consulate in Warsaw. The position in Finland is especially bad from this point of view, owing to the accentuation of class differences by the arming of the middle classes and the disarming of the working classes, a measure which has been of enormous assistance to the “Internationalist” propaganda in that country.

Even here in London the establishment of a Bolshevik embassy with the Red flag flying over it might have anything but a tranquillizing effect on a section of our working classes. Workmen and private soldiers, who would be incapable of feeling any sympathy with a foreign nation which attacked England, might, in some cases, sympathize with what Chicherin calls “the Government of the Poor and of the Oppressed.” You will notice from this phrase how Bolshevism has stolen the thunder of Christianity. Thus one of the principal Bolshevik newspapers is called Bednota (Poverty). Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik Minister of the Fine Arts, has maintained in numberless discourses delivered in Russia that Christ was the first Bolshevik, and that the early Christians were the first Communists. Even anti-Bolsheviks have expressed astonishment at Lenin’s choice of “such a dangerous clerical”; but doubtless Lenin knew, when he made the appointment, that a Modernist like Lunacharsky is a far more dangerous enemy to Christianity than a violent unbeliever. He was still engaged in this campaign when I was in Moscow in the spring, and I think that, in the opinion of the simple Russians who heard him, he had the advantage of the learned theologians who ventured to dispute his theory. A drift towards religious anarchy has long been characteristic of the Russians, as may be seen by a study of their literature for the last fifty years. It has been counteracted by a powerful ecclesiastical organization, but the Bolsheviks have now stopped the machinery of that organization, and are undermining all confidence in it by a series of carefully conducted exposures in connection with bogus relics of saints, etc.

Even if the Bolshevik succeeded in establishing Soviet republics all over the world, they could not succeed in eliminating national feeling and war, for, in this as in other matters, they are fighting against human nature. But even their temporary success would, I think, do irreparable harm to our civilization. And it would be foolish to ignore the fact that their theory does contain a seductive appeal to that large number of people in every land who are convinced that they have never had a fair chance owing to the faulty construction of the society in which they live. The seductiveness of that appeal is increased by the most ingenious devices. If a Bolshevik embassy comes to London, it will not only fly the Red flag, signifying the triumph of the proletariat, but it will use on its official notepaper and on all its stamps the crest of the Republic—a crossed hammer and reaping-hook, symbolical of the union of peasants and workers. If the Bolshevik trade unions and other organizations send deputations to this country, they will also use seals which are in all cases humble implements of manual labour. A Bolshevik official once pointed out to me with pride that the Communists had thrown into the scrap-heap the lions and eagles, swords and battle-axes, and all the other emblems of ferocity and slaughter in which the old heraldry delighted, and had substituted for them “the poor, crooked scythe and spade.” In his opinion—the comparison is sacrilegious, but we must know the views of the other side in order to combat them—the world has entered on a phase such as that which began when a gibbet replaced the Roman eagles as the emblem under which the most important portion of humanity marched.

The Bolsheviks have, of course, no right to a monopoly of those emblems, which were chosen for them by clever literary men who have never done manual labour in their lives, but many people are misled by symbols. All pictorial advertisement is based on this weakness in the logical powers of the human mind. An advertisement containing a picture of a fat baby and a eulogy of somebody’s patent food establishes in the mind of the average woman a connection between the fatness of the baby and the nutritive value of the food, though no such connection necessarily exists; and the Bolsheviks, who are extremely up to date in many of their methods, act continually and with great success on this principle in all their propaganda. The pictorial propaganda which raised the Kitchener Army is elementary in comparison with the propaganda which raised the Red Army, and this latter propaganda is only one manifestation of a system carefully and scientifically constructed by men of considerable artistic talent and with a profound knowledge of Russian, and indeed of world, psychology.

This sort of deception is easier when, as is the case at present, a sort of madness has seized upon men’s minds, as has happened on one or two occasions in the past history of Europe. On such occasions all opinions and beliefs seem to become, so to speak, liquefied or molten, and the mind of the world is ready to take the imprint of any new stamp that is applied to it. When this period of liquefaction has passed, opinions harden again either in the new mould or in the old mould. The Reformation and the French Revolution are cases in point. The former established the principle of private judgment and maimed the system of an international Church. The latter established the rule of the bourgeoisie and made the heads of states their servants. According to the contention of Lenin and his followers who, to do them justice, are close students of past history and take a wide survey of it, the proletariat have now as much right to subjugate the middle classes as the latter had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to subjugate the nobility and heads of states. All the Bolshevik literature now being published emphasizes this point. Lenin cannot see how England, which allowed the right of private judgment to her middle classes in the seventeenth century, and allowed every kind of Reformist literature to enter the country, can now deny the right of private judgment to her lower classes and prevent Bolshevik publications from circulating among them. The Bolshevik leader knows that, as the present period of liquefaction will not last long, it is necessary for him to act quickly, or else public opinion in England will harden again and the receptivity of the popular mind in England to the new ideas will cease, or, as we would put it, the period of madness will pass. As Lenin would put it, Spain was kept unchanged during and after the Reformation owing to the energetic measures taken by Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second to prevent the circulation of Reformist literature among their subjects, though it is an historical fact that the latter manifested a keen appetite for this forbidden fruit. The Bolsheviks admit that, if England could establish a similarly strict blockade against their ideas, England would be saved from Bolshevism, but they do not think that, under modern conditions and with trade re-established between the two countries, and especially in view of her well-known theories on the subject of free speech and a free press, England can ever establish such a blockade. Some of them are enthusiastic on this subject; others are inclined to fear that they are already too late; that, in these swift days of the aeroplane and the radio, movements of popular effervescence soon pass, and that Great Britain is hardening again in the old bourgeois mould.

I have tried to make it clear how impossible it is for the Communists to abandon their theory and practice of international propaganda. My contention may be strengthened by a description, from personal observation, of the conditions which prevail in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs at Moscow. Most of the members of that department belong to the Third International, and their main work is to produce revolutions in foreign countries. After working hard all day organizing trouble for us in India, Persia, Turkey, and Egypt, they allow themselves some comic relief and relaxation in the afternoon by the composition of soothing despatches intended for the English bourgeoisie. One of them, Commissar Feinberg, acted very often as correspondent of an English newspaper, the Daily Herald. Many of the English passports which go through Feinberg’s hands get “lost”—that is, they are set aside for the use of Bolshevik emissaries going to England, or else utilized as models in the well-equipped establishment for the fabrication of English passports which the “Third International” has inaugurated. English banknotes are also fabricated there, and may be expected on the market at any moment. Thus we have the Foreign Office of a great country deliberately forging the passports and the paper money of a foreign Government with which it is conducting friendly negotiations, and Foreign Office officials calmly supervising the work of forgery.

I have already spoken of the character of the Pan-Mohammedan Congress held under the ægis of Chicherin in April, 1920, of his Korean and Japanese intrigues, and of the entertainment provided for foreign revolutionaries who are housed, fed, paid, and clothed by the Soviet Government, travel free, and enjoy every facility for their destructive activities.

Can we make the Bolshevik Government stop all this? I do not think that we can, for the Foreign Office, like the Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and one or two other organizations of technical experts, is regarded by the Executive Committee generally as being very lukewarm in the faith and as having made too many concessions already to the capitalistic heretics outside. The organization of the “Third International” is so interwoven with the Bolshevik Government organization that it would be difficult to say where the one ends and the other begins, and quite impossible to tear them apart. Most of the leading Commissars are in “the International” as well as in the Communist group which rules Russia, and they can never be depended upon to expel themselves from the latter body. Foreign revolutionaries orate frequently from the same platform as Lenin and Trotsky, and they are not regarded as foreigners because in the Communist scheme of things there are no foreigners. There are only Proletariat and Parasites.

I must admit, however, that the Reds are as afraid of us as we are afraid of them; indeed, my stay among them gave me the impression that one of their leading characteristics was an intense suspicion and great fear of what they call “the great predatory Empires.”

Their state of mind is, in some respects, the same as Japan’s was in 1868. Japan then found herself the only non-Christian nation in the world which the Christian Whites had not conquered or undermined; and, consequently, she became profoundly alarmed at the irresistible military strength, the utter unscrupulousness, and the consummate diplomatic talent of the European, with the result that their whole national character, which is naturally joyous, became permanently altered for the worse. I do not mean to say that this change took place in 1868. It began, as a matter of fact, long before, in the time of the Shogun Hideyoshi, when the Philippines had been conquered by Spain and Japan itself had become filled with Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits; but the effects were apparent twenty years ago, when I lived in Japan, and are apparent still.

I shall now give the Bolshevik point of view, not because I sympathize with it, but because it is always useful to know what the people on the other side think and to understand the suspicions and delusions under which they labour.

The Bolshevik Government now finds itself the only Government of its kind in the world, and in an infinitely more dangerous position than the Japanese were. The Government of the Shoguns represented all the Japanese race, which was as patriotic and as firmly welded together as the British race was in 1914 and is still. The Government of Lenin is brand-new, and has therefore none of the forces and sanctions of tradition behind it. It represents but a very small section of the Russian people and is menaced not only by powerful interests inside Russia, but also, in the firm opinion of the Bolsheviks, by all the other Governments in the world, republican as well as monarchical. The Soviet Republic believes that these Governments hate it intensely, and are, some of them, in a state of acute fear for their own existence. But I have seen myself that the countries which suffer most from this fear—Finland, for example—are by no means in such a state of panic as the Bolshevik Government, which is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that all the wealth of the world and all the intellect of the world are working against it ceaselessly and with supreme ability. Wealth, according to Lenin, is naturally against him; and intellect has been subdued to the service of wealth by capitalism, religion, patriotism, and militarism.

Despite all their bluster and all their military success, the Bolsheviks therefore feel themselves at times to be nothing but amateurs in the realms of diplomacy, war, secret service, and economics; and, on more than one occasion, Lenin himself confessed to a painful sinking at the heart, and even declared in public that his great experiment would probably fail.

The leading Bolsheviks whom I met in Moscow are profoundly convinced that their enemies have a great advantage over them in being able to offer rewards which they cannot offer—wealth, comfort, high and permanent positions, the esteem of powerful and ancient empires, the blessings of religion. The Soviet can only give its agents hard work, danger, permanent discomfort. It cannot provide them even with good cigarettes or with matches which will light. It can only promise them the applause of a small clique, not the applause of a people. It measures so accurately the tremendous strength of the temptations to which they are exposed that, when it sends abroad not only an ordinary agent, but even a leading Commissar, it generally keeps his wife or some of his relatives behind as a hostage, lest, corrupted by the gold of the capitalists, he should grow faint-hearted, tired of the bitter, unending struggle, and abandon them altogether.

Lenin has himself confessed, in moments of depression, that, though there are nominally 600,000 Communists in Russia, there are not 6,000 who can be trusted implicitly. Only fanatics can be depended upon in all circumstances, and fanatics are few, even in Russia. The average man cannot rise to the heights or sink to the depths of fanaticism, and even if he does, he is easily tempted by the easy, normal life which ensures him cigars, beer, soap, clean linen, and other comforts which Bolshevism cannot give him, not to speak of nice dresses, jewelry, scent, and real tea with sugar in it for his wife, as well as playthings for his children.

Even the fanatics in Russia have been kept at too tense a strain during the last two years: weak human nature cannot stand it. Lenin and Trotsky both realize this, and are appalled by the infinite staying-power, the secular experience, and the extreme seductiveness of the vast, patient force entrenched in front of them. They are all the more appalled because they realize that, though the workers are tired, the work has hardly yet begun.

The foregoing explains why Lenin and Trotsky tolerate, and will in all probability continue to tolerate, such a mediæval institution as the Extraordinary Commission. Despite the dangerous wideness of its powers, it at least guards them from the anti-Bolshevik conspirators and the foreign agents who, in their opinion, swarm in every part of Russia.

Most of the things we say about them they say about us. We praise their “Intelligence,” but they think that ours is of extreme and deadly efficiency. They gave me to understand that more than 99 per cent. of the sympathetic foreigners to whom they opened their minds have turned out to be agents of their worst enemies. Trotsky, in particular, has become so nervous and frightened at what he regards as the “disloyalty” of sympathetic Britishers that he starts whenever he is addressed in English, and, though he speaks that language fairly well, he conducts the conversation in Russian or French if his interlocutor happens to know either of these languages.

He does not understand our institutions; he is suffering from overwork and nervous strain; he is even afraid for his own life; and, consequently, he believes the impossible story of the renegade French officer Sadul that the British Government hired assassins to murder him. We must bear this in mind if we want to understand fully the truth of Mr. Lloyd George’s remark in this connection, that we are “dealing not with realities, but with illusions, myths, and ghosts.”

What frightens the Bolsheviks most of all, however, is the well-founded suspicion that the very nature of man is working against them. All their attempts to abolish capitalism, trading, and that legitimate desire for gain which, after all, makes the world go round, are as futile as cutting water with a sword and expecting the fissure to remain open. Not a month passes without the Extraordinary Commission discovering that some new financial or commercial nucleus has formed on the old lines; and for the past six months a vast amount of speculation has been connived at in Moscow and elsewhere. As much of this speculation is carried on, especially in the Moscow Food Control, by high officials of the Soviet itself, the Extraordinary Commission lost heart altogether in April last and has practically ceased to contend against it ever since.

Even this natural result the Bolsheviks attribute, however, to “Capitalist” Propaganda, so that they have decided that there is not room in the world for both a Soviet and a Capitalist Government. Hence, plots for the overthrow of all existing Governments, counteraction by these Governments, and a thickening of the fog of suspicion, a multiplication of the “illusions, myths, and ghosts.”