monstrous figures, and, to save themselves, and from respect for other little lazy minds, they leap for the easiest tawdry explanation, and say, “Ah, yes, bogies made in Germany with candles inside turnip heads!” Then having found their miserable little atheistical explanation they din it into everybody, so that other people shall make the same mistakes, and they have company in folly, and so be excused. And in the end it becomes difficult for even honest-minded sturdy folk in England to look those bogies squarely in their turnip faces and to see that they are not bogies at all, but the real article, giants, whose movements in the mist are of greater import for the future of the world than anything else that is happening in our day.
I think it possible that the Revolution will fail. If so, then its failure will not mean that it loses its importance. The French Revolution gave a measure of freedom to every nation in Europe, although it failed most notably in France and ended in a Dictator and a defeated Dictator at that, and, for the brave clearsighted France, foreseen by Diderot and Rousseau, substituted a France in which thought died and everyone was prone to grub money with a view to enslaving everybody else. The failure of the French Revolution did not lessen the ardor which the ideas which sprung from it poured into the minds that came to their maturity after 1795. And perhaps it was that failure that sharpened the conflict of the first half of the nineteenth century, when, after it, many candles were lit and fiercely, successfully guarded in the windy night which followed the revolutionary sunset. Let the revolution fail. No matter, if only in America, in England, in France, in Germany men know what it was that failed, and how it failed, who betrayed it, who murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as by the purpose of his deeds. We have seen the flight of the young eagles. Nothing can destroy that fact, even if, later in the day, the eagles fall to earth one by one, with broken wings.
It is hard here, where the tragedy is so close at hand, so intimate, not to forget the immediate practical purpose of my writing. It is this: to set down, as shortly as possible the story of the development of the Soviet power in Russia, to show what forces in Russia worked against that power and
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