with its products, and when it not only meets the needs of the peasant but, besides furnishing him with the necessities of life, so improves his position that its superiority over the capitalistic system will be evident and palpable. This, and nothing else, would constitute the basis of normal Socialistic society. We cannot bring this about immediately—so harassed are we by ruin, need and impoverishment.
It is, indeed, a large-sized task for an utterly bankrupt and incredibly inefficient bureaucracy to lift up materially the level of 100,000,000 wretched and embittered agriculturists. To accomplish this the Bolshevists' grandiose and original idea is to sell all that is most valuable in Russia, industrially, to foreign capitalists. This plan, in turn, is based upon the expectation of a world revolution which, within a few months or a few years, will make it unnecessary to pay the foreign capitalists for the new plants and machinery that will have been set up. Even if this plan is not unanimously held by every one of the negotiators, the fact that it is openly preached to the entire Russian nation proves that any such concessions are likely to be the source of endless international friction and possibly of wars, whatever the future government of Russia may be. If that government is Bolshevist the agitation for world revolution will continue, revived whenever any foreign upheaval threatens. If the future government is non-Bolshevist it will certainly repudiate the transaction that led to the delivery of these vast sums into the hands of the Bolshevist enemy, and to this attempted wholesale alienation of the patrimony of generations yet unborn. (See Chapter XIII.)
