other countries. But nothing could delay the desirable event more effectively than to assume it has occurred when it has not. This newspaper continues:
Now Lenin "solves" the peasant problem, as he is said to be solving the problem of capitalism by giving it up. In what is incomparably the largest field of Russian industry, he drops Communism.
Again the time element is all important. If it is wholly misleading to assume a momentous event that has not yet taken place, it is equally misleading to date in the present an event that has occurred long ago and so to attribute it to present causes—in this instance the yielding of the Soviets to the pressure of the peasants or of foreign capitalists. We shall show that the impossibility of applying communism to agriculture, far from being in Bolshevist minds (as it would be in the minds of the rest of humanity) an argument for abolishing the communist dictatorship, is precisely the one reason they have given from the first for establishing that dictatorship and the one reason why they urge that—in the face of rising peasant discontent—it is more than ever essential for them to maintain it now.
Such views as those just quoted are not confined to the conservative organs of the opposition party. One of the leading Republican papers, which had favored the trade agreement, continued to insist editorially that the question was whether "Lenin and Trotzky mean it when they say Bolshevism is dead"—though this imaginary statement is the very reverse of everything
