sought and obtained a separate peace. The first aim of the Bolsheviks was, as it always will be, a Universal Social Revolution. They hoped to illustrate to the workers of the world the possibility of honorable peace, and nothing would have pleased them better than to find that such a peace was rejected by all governments alike, so that the workers, convinced of its possibility, should rise and overthrow them. That was their general aim. They, least of all Governments in the world, were interested in a German victory. Their proposal was for a general peace, for the peace which Russia, in agony, had been awaiting for a year.
What followed? Step by step, they published every detail of their negotiations over the armistice, every word of the German replies. Then came the first German answer as to the conditions of peace, in which Germany and her Allies expressed themselves ready to make this Russian formula the basis of negotiation. The Bolsheviks believe that if the Allies had even at that late hour joined them, so that in withdrawing from that position the Germans would have been facing a continuance of the war as a whole instead of merely a failure to obtain peace with the weakest of the Allies, peace on the Russian formula would have been attainable. The Allies left them, unrecognized, ignored, to continue their struggle singlehanded. The Germans now took a bolder line, and the hand outstretched in spurious friendship became a grasping claw. The first Russian delegation came home to confer with the Soviet Government as to what was to be done in this new situation when the peace they had promised their exhausted army, their tortured working classes, seemed to be fading like a mirage. Trotzky at the head of a reinforced delegation went to Brest with one of the most daring plans with which any Daniel had sought to destroy his Goliath.
The absence of the Allies had deprived him of the possibility of exhibiting to the working classes of the world the inability of their present governments to conclude a peace in which should be neither conqueror nor conquered. He now attempted to bring about a revolution in Germany, or obtain such a peace for Russia by making the German Government itself illustrate in their negotiations with him their utter disregard for the expressed wishes of the German people. He did actually succeed in causing huge strikes, both in Austria and in Germany, and it is impossible for anyone to say that he would not have finally succeeded in hitting
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