another, even rich Americans, dependent for their full pockets on the continuance of the present capitalist system, can wholeheartedly admire the story of the bolshevik adventure, and even wish for its success, without fearing any serious damage to the edifice in which they live, on which they feed, like parasites on cheese. Or it may be that, knowing so little about America, I let myself think too well about it. Perhaps there too men go about repeating easy lies, poisoning the wells of truth from simple lack of attention to the hygiene of the wind. I do not know. I only know that, from the point of view of the Russian Revolution, England seems to be a vast nightmare of blind folly, separated from the continent, indeed from the world, by the sea, and beyond that by the trenches and deprived, by some fairy godmother who was not invited to her christening, of the imagination to realize what is happening beyond. Shouting in daily telegrams across the wires from Russia I feel I am shouting at a drunken man asleep in the road in front of a steam roller. And then the newspapers of six weeks ago arrive, and I seem to see that drunken sleeping fool make a motion as if to brush a fly from his nose, and take no further notice of the monstrous thing bearing steadily towards him. I love the real England, but I hate, more than I hate anything on earth (except cowardice in looking at the truth) the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence that prevents the English from making an effort of imagination and realizing how shameful will be their position in history when the tale of this last year in the biography of democracy comes to be written. How shameful, and how foolish … for they will on that day be forced to realize how appalling are the mistakes they committed, even from the mere bestial standpoint of self-interest and expediency. Shameful, foolish and tragic beyond tears … for the toll will be paid in English blood. English lads will die, and English lads have died, not one or two, but hundred of thousands, because their elders listen to men who thinly little things and tell them little things, which are so terribly easy to repeat. At least half of our worst mistakes have been due to the underestimation of some person or force outside England, and disturbing to little men who will not realize that chaos has come again and that giants are walking in the world. They look across Europe and see huge things,
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