83
of soldiers, sailors and ail those who up to now have with their work, blood and privations maintained Capitalist Governments, and to whom the latter have thrown principles and generous ideas only in order to deceive them and with the injunction, never on any account to think of the practical realisation of these principles and ideas! This is the only form that can assure to exhausted, bleeding Europe peace, concord, justice, right and construction of a new life, in the place of the terrible nightmare, in the most frightful drama that History has ever known.
Time,—as we must occasionally remind ourselves,—is decisive factor in human life. It does not, alas, belong to the dreams and generous speculations of the mind, It belongs wholly and exclusively to the brutal exigencies of action. Whether one likes it or not, to-day it can only be a question of a fighting Government, that is to say of a Government which unfortunately has to rely, temporarily upon exceptional laws—a dictatorship. And this dictatorship can only be either dictatorship of capital and the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. The former, whether or not it be realised by Lloyd George, Clemanceau, Scheidemann or Koltchak, can have only one aim: the strengthening, the consolidation, and the re-establishment of what existed before the War, that is to say of a regime which has signed its own condemnation, a regime the logical development of which has resulted in an awful massacre, Although the massacre has for the time being ceased, we shall never be able to free ourselves from its menace, still less recover from it,
