5
posing an all-round peace with "no annexations, no indemnities," had continued the war, we should have swallowed our objections to their doctrine, and even if to raise the sinews of war they had expropriated every rouble in Russia, we should have applauded the patriotic dictation of the proletariat. The Peace Conference, which is now pulling the leg of nations, the Peace Conference with its President whoso nickname of the Tiger preserves the law of the jungle, would have welcomed Lenin and Trotski to its table. Now they are told to go to Prinkipo.
We must do Lloyd George the justice to admit it was not he who wanted them to wait on the mat. Perhaps he has had his lesson. 'Through Terror to Triumph' was the name of a collection of his speeches. Perhaps he has come now 'Through Triumph to Terror.' For the Knock-out Blow he insisted on has been given—but by Russia. Whoever meddles with Russia seems to catch a Tartar. Russia baffled Napoleon by a new tactic and she may yet baffle Foch. For she has transformed the strife of nations into a conflict of classes and the war that was won horizontally may be lost perpendicularly.
The whole social order is rocking from China to Peru. But if our politicians didn't want the world's foundations to shake, why did they stake all its fortunes on the Knock-out Blow? They knew how the Napoleonic wars had left all Europe rumbling with revolution. Why did they gag and blind us, stifle every gleam of reason and every impulse of humanity, set black and yellow against white, refusing to look beyond the murderous moment, abandoning the planet for five years to blood-lust, frenzy, and famine?
Victory covers a multitude of sins, but it cannot avert their consequences. You cannot sow the wind and reap the doldrums. Bolshevism followed as naturally from that saturnalia of savagery and that agony of starvation as the Black Death, camouflaged as Spanish influenza, rose from the myriads of putrefying corpses. "Comrades," cried a simple Russian soldier back from the front, "I bring you greetings from the spot where men are digging their own graves and call them trenches." The Russian soldiers wanted peace, the peasants land, the citizens bread. It was an irresistible triad.
I regret their methods. I would not have raised a finger to help them. But now that they have helped themselves I would not undo their work. That would be a waste of the blood already shed, the destruction of a precious social experiment an experiment moreover made not upon us but on the vile body of Russia. Bolshevism must be let alone. If it is a curse let it go home to roost. If
