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anxious to intervene: horrors which for the most part, indeed, were the very result of our intervention. Had we recognised Lenin's Government as we recognised Kerensky's, instead of trying both secretly and openly to subvert it, Bolshevism would have been comparatively bloodless. But it was forced to stand with its back to the wall against the whole world. This animal, as Buffon puts it, is very spiteful: when you attack it, it defends itself.
The latest excuse for intervention is that Bolshevism has replaced Prussianism in aggressive and invasive militarism. But, as the books of strategy teach, attack is often the best form of defence. In the classic language of Barney Barnato, when you see a man about to hit you, you hit him first. But Russia must be saved from the Bolsheviks, the defeated Russian parties tell us. "For reasons of high morality," cries M. Savinkoff, the head of the Omsk military mission to Paris, "it is an international duty to put an end to the odious massacres which mark the Red Terror." Who is this M. Savinkoff, this preacher of high morality, now in such high honour in Paris? The man who, according to his own 'Confessions,' recently published in Bourzeff's organ Biloie, was, together with the provocateur Aseff, at the head of the Terrorist branch of the Social Revolutionaries; the man who, though at one with Lenin in his land policy, would have none of Lenin's constitutional methods; the man who in 1908 took part in an attempt to assassinate the Czar, and who actually handed the bomb which killed the Grand Duke Sergius. This is indeed an example of Satan rebuking sin.
As for the Great Powers that M. Savinkoff exhorts to intervene against Bolshevist violence, why even the greatest and noblest of them, President Wilson, has preached: "Force, force without stint, force to the utmost limit." Though he now sits high on the fence, smiling like Sunny Jim, force is the food that raised up him. When I last stood on this platform, nearly two years ago, it was to complain that a mass of men just about equal to the audience in this vast hall was being murdered and mutilated every day, and that this incredible Red Terror had been going on for nigh a thousand days. Nevertheless it went on tor another five hundred days, and Lord Curzon has regretted it did not go on a little longer. Those who objected to taking a hand in it were put away and tortured like John Maclean. Therefore pacifist though I am, I feel that when the Allies presume to lecture Trotski and Lenin, these men are entitled to reply: "Mind your own bloody business."
Th® truth is we wanted more bloodshed, not less, and if the Bolsheviks instead of nobly pro-
