gram, of maximum claims which will leave far behind, in the audacity of its conceptions, those programs developed by the most cultivated nations. Of such a nature is the table of commandments which stands to-day in Moscow, base of the actual Russian confusion. If that body of law has served as a base for the reputation of Lenine, let us hasten to say that never was a reputation more unstable, more usurped. One asks one's self how a man of talent could so mistake the distance that lay between the ci-devant Russia and the ideal of his dreams. Lenine has shown a kind of lack of appreciation of realities, a certain aberration of common sense which would shame the last of the titular counselors of the ex-empire of the Tsars! He is muddling along in a Utopia; only Lenine could have the courage to find, all at once and with one stroke of the pen, a definite solution of the troubles of Russia and of all the world, a remedy for those most complex social and economic disorders which for three hundred years have troubled a nation of a hundred and twenty-four million souls. His brain must be closed to the knowledge of evolution to give birth to such an absurd notion of the State; and take note, that he appears to be the last to doubt of the success and the realization of his dream. 'We are invincible even as the worldwide proletarian revolution itself is invincible!" Nevertheless, his failure is to-day seen everywhere. Like all tyrants, Lenine is deceived by his acolytes; his empire exists no longer; prince of a band of light-fingered illuminati, he is hardly the chief of several oases bound together by telegraph wires and specks of mud and blood!

Here are some extracts from the program of the Bolsheviki, or, more properly the Social-Democrat Worker's Party of Russia. I cannot, unhappily, give them in extenso; such a proceeding would require too much space. I shall hold to the important matters.

The Constitution of the democratic Republic of Russia should guarantee among other things:

I. The autocracy of the people.

2. The general electoral right, equal and direct for all men and women citizens who have reached the age of eighteen years. The ballot to be secret.

3. Proportional representation at all elections.

4. Both delegates and elected candidates of office to be liable to instant removal at the demand of a majority of their electors.

5. Local self-governments to be instituted, self-government for all regions presenting special conditions of life or whose population is of a special nature.

6. Suppression of all local or regional authorities named by the State. Unlimited liberty (sic.) of conscience, speech, the press, etc.

7.

1 Letters to American Workingmen.

8.

Acknowledgment of all local languages, suppression of any obligatory national language.

9. Acknowledgement of the right of all the nations which form the Russian Empire to separate themselves and form their own States. The Russian Peoples Republic should draw to itself other peoples and nationalities not by violence but by the spontaneous expression of a common will towards the creation of a common State.

10. Separation of the Church from the State and of the School from the Church, complete laicization of the school system.

II. As a fundamental necessity to the democratization of the national budget, the party demands the suppression of all indirect taxes and the introduction of a progressive tax on all incomes and inheritances; moreover, the development of capitalism and the disorder created by the imperialist war leads the party to demand the nationalization of banks, capitalist syndicates, etc.

In the hope of suppressing the 'slavery' which still weighs upon the peasant, and of developing freely the class war in rural districts (sic.) the party desires

1. The immediate confiscation of lands belonging to the upper landholding class—thus the lands of the Crown, the Church, etc.

2. The immediate transmission of all lands to the hands of Peasants' Councils.

3. The further nationalization of all lands in the State: this nationalization to mean the transmission of the property right of these lands to the State which shall have the authority to divide these lands among democratic elements.

4. That the initiative of the peasants who have in certain localities gathered together the instruments of production-ploughs, agricultural machines, etc.—and have handed them over to a central committee, should be sustained.

5. That the proletarians and demi-proletarians of the rural regions should be encouraged to demand the transformation of the farms of the gentlemen landholders into model farms run for the public by councils of rural workmen.

Such is the famous program. It is not necessary to study it long in order to discover its omissions. But let us first put them aside and try rather to arrive at a well-knit idea of the ensemble of the Bolshevist program. Once you have grasped it, you will be struck by its purely Utopian character; note how it reeks of hatred; it is the hatred of Lenine which is at work, not that of the Russian masses whom he has massacred by the thousand just to harden his Red Guards; the program scarcely hides that spirit of vengeance bred from a sickly sentimentalism and devout commiseration for the martyrdom of a people, a martyrdom far more illusory than real, yet savagely held to by generations of dreamers who invented the 'religion of suffering.'

Let us now try to get at the heart of the system.

It reveals a new conception of the State which one may call the Bolshevik idea, a narrow, unilateral, inhuman system which may be thus expressed. 'If the State has been the means by which the bourgeoisie oppresses the proletariat, the proletariat, arrived at political power, will use the State to oppress the bourgeoisie.'

Intransigent and intolerant in its false simplicity, this conception of the State admits no mediating idea, no notion of equilibrium or compromise. Speak not of democracy or even of classic Socialism—these ideas, no matter how wide or how generous they may be, will mean to Lenine and his friends only enslavement by the bourgeoisie. No; for the bourgeois State, source of all evil, shall be substituted the proletariat State, the source of all that is beautiful and good, and that State shall be given maximum powers.

There is in this notion a filtered cynicism which I do not relish.

I know that Lenine adds that the Socialist State shall have such a rôle only during the period of transition, that is, during the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that the State will once more become the regulator of the political and economic life of the country once the difference between classes no longer exists. And this, to my mind, is only another proof of the legislator's naïveté; he believes in the possibility of dissolving such a difference. Must we tell him that the bourgeoisie, though financially ruined, will not abdicate its moral and intellectual superiority? I offer as testimony many examples observed in Soviet Russia in which the middle classes, turned into bootblacks, errand runners, porters, and trench diggers, have from the very first overwhelmed their professional rivals, while the proletarians, transmogrified into public officials and factory managers, have pitiably failed, betrayed by their incapacity and the accusation of their conscience.

UNDER WHICH KING, BEZONIAN?1

The economic program [of the Bolsheviks] is the extreme form of Marxian socialism-a theory that has been discussed for two generations in thousands of volumes, so that we must assume it to be clear in outline for all intelligent readers. Its fundamental conception is, of course, a reorganization of society on such a basis that there shall be no private or individual property in land or any of the means of production, and no other form of income than that paid by the state for productive services rendered to the state. Therefore there will be no rent, no profits, and no interest-and also no wages,

1 By Henry C. Emery. From an article in Yale Review. 8:680-93. July,

ap

in the sense of wages paid by one private individual to another. What is new and startling about the program of the Bolsheviks is that they do not predict this system as something to be brought about in a distant future by economic evolution, but that they propose to bring it about at once by force. And they not only propose to do it, they are actually trying it out. We confront then this simple fact, that the long predicted has at last occurred. The war of the classes has begun. This is the one great dramatic fact about what is called Bolshevism. Furthermore, there is no profound significance in its pearance first in Russia rather than elsewhere. It happened that the great war had in that country its earliest and most disastrous disintegrating effect. Somewhat to their own surprise the militant leaders of the social revolution found in Russia the best soil for the seed of their doctrine and the best opportunity for its application by force. The easiest and most shallow way to brush aside this new doctrine-or rather this new incarnation of an old doctrine-is to say that it is "unAmerican." Of course it is un-American, just as it is unEnglish, un-French, un-German, and un-Russian. It is altogether un-national. Lenine happens to be a Russian, and the movement has so far assumed an established form only in Russia, but Bolshevism was not devised as a system of government peculiarly fitted to Russia-or for Russia only—nor is it a natural product of Russian character or of Russian institutions. Indeed, many students of the movement believe that Russia is the least fitted of all great countries for the enduring continued success of such an experiment and that while Bolshevism advances in other countries, it will give way first in Russia. The thought is expressed both by the critics of the movement and by its friends. It is even said that Lenine himself shares this opinion.

Recognizing then that Bolshevism is a cumulation of a revolutionary world movement rather than the natural outcome of a purely Russian revolution, it will make the situation clearer to recall a few dates of world importance. The year 1815 marks the end of a great period of national conflicts, the course of which had been determined by the rivalry of nations for conquest and power. A world exhausted by war settled down to an era of peace and retrenchment, and of industrial expansion. This period lasted for fifty years, and during it men's minds turned more to new problems of social reconstruc

tion, brought about by the new economic conditions. In 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto with the startling new summons, "Proletarians of all Countries United." After a momentary spasm of excitement, the world went on its way, leaving socialism to develop as a system of philosophy for academic discussion. The kernel of the new socialism was that "all history is a history of class struggle," that consequently the idea of class consciousness must be kept vividly before the minds of the masses, and that ultimately by the working of inevitable forces the system of capitalistic production based on private property must break down. The propertied classes might sputter at such a teaching, but as long as its leaders confined themselves to predicting an economic collapse by the action of natural causes, they were not molested.

In the meantime a new era of nationalism began. Wars, national rivalries, national expansion, and more wars followed each other. The most striking features of this new era were the formation of the German Empire, and the war of the nations through which we have passed. The socialistic theory of history, namely, that all history is a history of class struggle, was patently false. The consciousness of national conflict was stronger than the consciousness of class conflict. Not a few earnest socialists, when the test came, found themselves far better patriots than they knew, and more deeply moved by the appeal of patriotism than by the appeal of class loyalty.

None the less, the socialistic theory of class struggle, though false as an explanation of all the phenomena of history, contained a very solid fact. A brilliant writer modified the original statement of the Communist Manifesto by saying that all history is a history of national struggle or class struggle-a contest either for the feeding-place (national aggrandizement) or for a share of the fodder (class war). In this brutal form the idea is again extreme and the facts of history have to be distorted too much to make them fit the formula. Yet the struggle of human groups is a struggle for power, and the two most important and abiding forms which such grouping takes are national or racial groups on the one hand and class groups on the other. We have just been through the most stupendous experience of national struggle in all history. At its completion we are facing the first thoroughly self-conscious conflict of the other kind on anything approaching the same scale.