do not understand, and hatred is the child of fear. That is why so many of us resort to brute force when the Bolshevist challenge is heard. Hate breeds hate. Terror breeds terror. The itinerant I. W. W. agitator talks loudly of revolution of force, threatens the overthrow and destruction of the State and the institutions upon which modern social life is based. He preaches to men who are, or feel themselves to be, the victims of injustice, the desperate gospel that freedom and justice can be had by uniting to discredit, defy and destroy the existing social order. Reckless, he gives approval and assent to all means of revolt and destruction, and scoffs at the "bourgeois idealism" of observing the disciplines and restraints of law and morality.

Wherever Bolshevism presents itself it is the product and counterpart of despotism and oppression. Extremes meet because they are natural affinities. The black terrorism of the Czars brought about the red terrorism of the Bolsheviki. The only substantial difference between Bolshevism and Czarism is that whereas the latter represented autocracy and tyranny from the top, exerting its pressure downward, the former represents autocracy and tyranny at the bottom, exerting its pressure upward. If there is any lesson at all for our guidance in the tragic and sinister drama of Bolshevism, it is that it flourishes best in the soil of oppressive and unjust political conditions and finds least congenial the soil of political and economic democracy, freedom and equality of opportunity.

The sympathy with Bolshevist theories and practices manifested by some of our intellectual romanticists and parlor revolutionists merits no serious attention, except in so far as it is shared by a not inconsiderable and increasing number of wageearners. It is here that the danger lies. And the danger is far greater than is generally recognized. Even our alarmist demagogues appear to have no clear idea of the extent to which the wage-earners of America believe in Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki. During the winter it was my privilege to lecture on Bolshevism to large audiences in many cities, and the manner in which the Bolsheviki found ready defenders, and the enthusiastic applause which greeted every such defender of the Bolshevist régime was a revelation. In more than one large city it has been apparent to me that of an audience of several hundred people, more than half were so favorably inclined to

Bolshevism that they cheered every mention of the names of Lenine, Trotzky and other Bolshevist leaders and laughed at the recital of their brutality. I have seen a great demonstration of approval by hundreds of men and women, wage-earners, when a Bolshevist defender in an Open Forum audience cried out, "We don't want democracy: it is a fraud! We want a proletarian dictatorship such as they have in Russia!"

It is in such facts as these that the real peril of America lies. Foolish indeed must we be to refuse to admit its grave significance, or to attempt to console ourselves with the admitted fact that such views are held by a small minority, that the great mass of the workers of America reject Bolshevism root and branch. We cannot afford to build such a fool's palace of false optimism. It is the very essence of Bolshevism that it depends on the minority and does not require the adhesion of the majority. In Russia there never has been a moment since the overthrow of Kerensky when the Bolsheviki were supported by as many as ten per cent. of the population. In Germany, again, the Spartacides, as the Bolsheviki of that country are called, openly boasted that they were only a minority; that the vast majority of the German workers were opposed to them, but that they were determined to rule, nevertheless. There is no danger that a majority of our people will become Bolsheviki; what danger there is relates to a minority of embittered and desperate souls. The most sanguine and daring of Bolshevist agitators in this country hope only to reach that minority.

Most of the men and women who cheered Bolshevist propaganda at the meetings referred to were of alien birth. Many of them were unnaturalized and all of them were as yet unassimilated into our national life. In most cases they came to America full of faith in democracy, expecting far too much from it, and their faith has been destroyed, and replaced by grim despair. America has taken them into its industrial life but has failed to win their affectionate trust. The basis for a profoundly great patriotism is therefore lacking. The seriousness of this failure lies in the fact that, alone among the great nations of the modern world, we have come to depend upon an alien proletariat. "Eighty per cent. of those who work in our plant are foreign born," I was told by a manufacturer in Bridgeport, Connecticut, “and forty-six languages are spoken by them. They neither comprehend America nor love it."

The surest way to promote Bolshevism is to permit the

continuance and development of unjust and oppressive political and economic conditions. Czarism produced Bolshevism in Russia, not because it was hereditary, nor because it was imperial, nor because it was based upon a theory of government long since discarded. It was none of these things which gave rise to Bolshevism, but the fact that the system resulted in political and economic injustice and inequality. It denied millions of human beings the political power to shape the policies of the State. It left millions of human beings in a state of economic insecurity and without any power to govern their own employment. Where men are oppressed; where toil brings not comfort, leisure and happiness, but poverty and increasing anxiety; where they have no effective voice in the government but are filled with political despair,-there, inevitably, the toxin of Bolshevism is engendered.

Why Are People Dissatisfied?

All this is old and social gospel, even as Bolshevism is an old and social evil. It is only the word that is new and foreign. The thing itself is found wherever industrialism oppresses human beings and robs them of hope and faith. Nikolai Lenine, the Red Premier of Russia, told a friend of mine not long ago that he had derived his chief inspiration from, and that the Bolshevist Soviet government was based upon, the ideas of our American product, the I. W. W. It was here in the United States that, as far back as 1905, a movement of wage-earners arose having for its object the substitution of what is now called Soviet Government for political government by parliamentary methods.

Why should the I. W. W. lack faith in our political democracy? Let us rather ask why the men and women of the I. W. W. should have any faith in it; why we should expect them to trust it. The organization is composed mainly of unskilled, migratory workers. The manner of our industrial development and organization requires that there shall be a large army of workers content to "follow the job" as the latter shifts from place to place. Take, for example, the lumber industry. Never was there an industry so important to the life and prosperity of a nation so anarchistically and recklessly carried on. Whole tracts have been swiftly denuded as by some mighty swarm of gigantic locusts, with no regard for the future, no reafforestation, leaving waste lands and dead and

This industry has de

decaying towns and villages behind. manded that workers move from place to place, migrating constantly from the freshly denuded tract to the tract marked for devastation and exploitation. Such conditions of employment make rational home life almost impossible. The stability essential to normal and healthy home life is absent. And it makes equally impossible the development of other important essentials, such as, for example, solid, enduring and responsible labor organizations and a strong community attachment and loyalty. The same results of migratory labor, the neverending movement of armies of workers from job to job, state to state, in response to the imperious demands of our industrial system, inevitably appear elsewhere. The great wheat belt of the northwest wants the army of "Wobblies" only for a short season, and the fruit-lands of sunny California for another short season.

Instead of facing this problem in an earnest and scientific way, we have ignored it whenever we could and, when that was impossible, have turned to the policeman's club or, worse still, the mob-law of "Vigilantes." We have thus developed what is potentially, at any rate, the most dangerous class ever developed in any country, a working class composed of strong, intelligent, self-reliant men virtually excluded from citizenship because disfranchised. Our electoral laws with their residential qualifications disfranchise the migratory workers. They may be, as hundreds of thousands of them are, native born, but they are not in reality citizens since they can never exercise the right to vote. Is it any wonder that men thus deprived of political power have no faith in political action and seek some other method of improving their lot?

*

Bolshevism or no Bolshevism, the workers of America, in common with workers elsewhere, will demand an effective share in the management of industry. Industrial Czardom is doomed. Democracy must be applied to industry. If we continue to leave industry outside the scope and influence of democratic control, denying to the workers direct representation in the management and control of their jobs, the result will be a bitter attempt to replace the dictatorship of capital by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The great lesson for us is that all dictatorship is bad and subversive of democratic civilization. The "dictatorship of the

proletariat" is bad, not because it is proposed that the dictatorship shall be by the proletariat. Any other kind of dictatorship would be as bad. It is surely significant that the demand for an effective share in industrial management does not come only from the I. W. W. and from radical labor organizations like the Machinists' Union, but from the most conservative unions in the country, the railway brotherhoods, demanding a partnership with the State in operation and management of the railways of the nation.

THE BOLSHEVIK SERUM'

We Russians are a people that have never worked as freemen. The Russian people has not had the opportunity to develop all its powers and abilities. When I think that the revolution has in it the possibilities to give Russia a chance at free labor and at untrammelled development my heart swells with hope and joy even in these days of blood and wine debauches.

Right here, however, begins the line of decisive and irreconcilable difference between myself and the insane activities of the people's commissaries.

I believe that the ideal Maximalism is quite useful for the uncontrollable Russian soul. It can wake in her the long needed activity and stir great desires. It can put life into this withered Russian soul, shape it and develop initiative in it.

But the practical Maximalism, the anarcho-communism of the visionaries at the Smolny Institute, is destructive to the country, and especially to the working class. The people's commissaries look upon Russia as material for experiments. The Russian people to them is like the horse which the learned bacteriologist inoculates with typhus bacilli in order to obtain from its blood the curative serum.

The reformers of the Smolny Institute are not concerned with Russia. They are calmly sacrificing Russia to their fantasy of a world revolution, or at least a European revolution.

Under present conditions of life in Russia a genuine revolution is unthinkable. You cannot change the 85 per cent of Russia's peasant population, with its ten million foreign speaking nomads, into Socialists overnight.

1 By Maxim Gorky. From New York Tribune. July 28, 1919.