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and as its tendency is to "roughen their characters," what they want is the country, and especially the paternal rod of the landowners. Under these conditions virtue, will be sure to thrive. And they sneered ill-naturedly at those who looked upon the working class as the salt of the earth. They used to say to us Marxists, disciples of the great Communist, Karl Marx: "Do you see what your workers are? They are swine, not men. They are blackguards! And yon say that they are the salt of the earth! A good whip and a stick—that is what they want; that will teach them to behave themselves."
Many were "convinced" by such arguments. But the truth of the matter is this: when the peasants went to town and broke with the country, the old village ties and traditions were forgotten. In the country they lived according to old traditions, looking up to the old men as if they were oracles, obeying them although they had grown childish with age: they would stay peacefully within the limits of their cabbage patch, never setting foot outside their native town, and would, of course, be afraid of am thing new. This is an example of rustic wisdom. Bad as it was, it served as a bridle, and helped to preserve village order. This simplicity vanished rapidly in the towns, where everything was new: new people, new outlooks, and a multitude of new temptations in store. No wonder that the old village morality vanished into thin air, and some time elapsed before a new was formed. It was this interval between two periods that came to be a period of depravity.
But during the course of events a new consciousness arose in the new sphere of life; the consciousness of the solidarity of the proletariat. The factory united the workers; the oppression of the capitalist taught them to struggle jointly: in the place of the weak, insipid grandfatherly wisdom there arose a new proletarian, outlook, infinitely higher than the old. It is this new outlook that is changing the proletariat into the most advanced, most revolutionary, most creative of all classes. We Communists, of course, and not the feudalist landowners, proved to be right.
At the present time the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries have taken up the attitude of the feudalists with regard to the army. They are loudly bewailing the disorganisation of the army, whilst laying the blame on the Bolsheviks. And just as the feudalists used to call the workers back into the country under the protective wing of the landowner and his
