Trotzky and Lenin have been saying. The Washington correspondent of another leading Republican organ declared that "the Russian Bolsheviki are ready to abandon the last vestiges of their program and to return to capitalism in industry as well as agriculture"—a statement for which he could produce no substantiation whatever from any quarter.
Several Republican and Democratic Senators were quoted in the press to similar" effect. One well-known Senator is reported as having said:
The danger that existed of political propaganda inspired and paid for by the Russian Government, has practically disappeared. I think it may be said that the Lenin-Trotzky Government has abandoned the effort to convert the world and is modifying its own Government into a much more conservative form than it started with.
The word "conservative" as well as the word "moderate" is thus being freely applied to those advanced extremists and revolutionaries who are a shade or two less red than others in a scale of violent revolution that now shows half a hundred varieties! The statement here made that Lenin and Trotzky are abandoning their propaganda for world revolt, as we shall show, is negatived by the entire structure and functioning of the Communist-Soviet machine. In the meanwhile we may quote at this point—as fairly conclusive evidence—the official Soviet wireless reply to the Hughes Note, which contains also a smashing rejoinder to the gratuitous newspaper assumptions we have referred to:
