Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/47

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FOUNDATIONS OF BOLSHEVISM
21

great Bolshevist "master mind." In his letter of last November to British labor he shows the same mixture of simplicity and arrogance. The substance of that letter was summed up last November by the pro-Soviet London Daily News as follows:

The true British Communist is told that it is his duty to cooperate with Mr. Henderson, Mr. Snowden and other degraded "bourgeois," in order to return members to Parliament pledged to destroy from within that institution, and incidentally to expose and ruin Mr. Henderson, Mr. Snowden and the colleagues who are to assist unwittingly in the operation. And this is said openly in the hearing of the intended victims and of the millions who are yet unconverted to the Gospel of Communist "hate." No one that we remember, except some of the German war lords towards the end of the great struggle, has ever thought aloud in public in this semi-insane manner. The parallel is ominous.

This letter was such an exhibition of incredible ignorance regarding Great Britain, combined with incapacity for the simplest logical reasoning, that even the friendly British Labor Party lost its patience while The Daily News, unable to restrain its wrath, thus characterized the Bolshevist "Czar":

Mad Kings, Tzars and Kaisers ruin, as a rule, only themselves and their subjects; a mad demagogue provides every half-witted enemy of liberty with a moral to his servile tale. …

Bolshevism has many enemies, but it has none so formidable as its foremost figure. We can imagine a man thinking in the sort of way in which Lenin talks to his British Communist "Comrades" in the extracts from his new book printed elsewhere in our columns