With Russian problems looming, so largely in the press lately, it might be interesting to know/ just what the working classes! of England think about the Russian; Bolsheviks and the stories of! atrocities that are so prolific from both sides. The average football-! coupon-filling working man cn} little interest in politics is so satiated with horrors and atrocities that he doesn't take any particular notice.
With the working man who is interested in politics (and the working man to-day who is interested polities is invariably a socialist), the Russian problem is envisage lecture, which was translated sentence by sentence by the trans. later, who expressly repudiated any responsibility for the statements made, contemptuously prefacing several of the sentences wit "this man says" The Russian, who asserted that he was a moulder by trade and a socialist in politics, made a bad impression by keeping his eyes on the floor. By this time there were perhaps 140 people in the audience.
The speech was only a catalogue of atrocities committed by the "Reds," 7,700 workmen had been i poor wo-Iman who had walked 2,000 versts to The working man in England is very suspicious of the interference in the private affairs of other countries. His point of view can be easily understood by the statement one was heard to make the other day. He said: "When those chaps in Russia and Germany have a revolution they ain't going to work so blooming hard; if they don't work so blooming hard they won't take my job off me, and I shan't have to work so blooming hard because then their bosses won't be able to undersell ours. So what I says is, let em revolute all they want to, if they ave to ave the old times back again, then the bosses ull: say we are a losing all our exas being exclusively a dastardly at tempt on the part of the capitalisti nations to squash the first socialist republic, The mild disapproval for the Soviet system voiced by moderate labour men such as Clynes ant Thomas, only provoke his contempt. Every atrocity alleged against the Reds is regarded as a libel on humanitarian republic more mild} than any utopian republic ever invented. Every atrocity alleged against the "Whites" is as true as the reverse is false. Latterly the chief defender of the Bolshevik government in Russia has been Professor Goode of Manchester University, whose articles in the "Mai chester Guardian" caused con able interest. and who has since written for various labour and socialist periodicals and toured the country lecturing on the Bolsheviks.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.