Edinburgh, April 20.
The great coal strike, with its railway and transport complications, has been compact of dramatic situations, culminating in the tragic break-up of the Triple Alliance. The outlook has changed with bewildering rapidity, crisis has quickly followed crisis, and always yesterday seems to be reversed by to-day. But one or two aspects of the civil war—it is no less—are of more than merely passing importance. One of them has evidently come to stay, and that is the power of the Bolsheviks. How this squalid and low-browed Kalmuc from the cellars of Moscow ever obtained entry to the circle of our political ideas can be explained only by the exceptional circumstances of the time, and by the fact that even the best-informed of nations must always contain a certain number of very ignorant and of very mischievous people. They ave a small minority, but they carry the youngsters and the irresponsibles with them. In the Fifeshire coalfields they have been responsible for serious disorders. They held up the important railway junction at Thornton for several hours, and looted railway waggons, shops, and even a cooperative store, an institution managed by the miners themselves. It was not until a large force of military, backed by naval ratings, appeared on_ the scene that order was restored.
A stranger walking through the Fife mining towns to-day would see orderly crowds of miners, well-behaved and for the greater part well disposed, and he might come to the conclusion that the collier population of these districts must. surely be maligned. But see them at a miners' meeting. There the extremists hold the platform, the promptings of reason are. stifled, and after the men of the "red" type have spoken, no one appears to have the courage to rally the moderate section of opinion and assert the common-sense point of view. There is every difference between the miner individually and the miner in the mass. The sanity of the average individual is flatly contradicted by the actions of these same average miners when they come together in a crowd, One is reminded of the saving of Carlyle, "Do we not see glimmering red-hot embers, if laid together, get into the brightest white glow?"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.