To understand the Bolshevik attitude towards the Orient and the ruthlessness of the Bolshevik policy in general one must come to realize, by reading Lenin and company, that the high fanatics in Russia are not ordinary intellectual reformers, not altruists who wish all men well. They are the advocates and the creators of class warfare. They have elected themselves the champions of a limited class selected and defined by Marx and his prophets, and they believe that this class, to be thoroughly self-conscious and efficient in the class war, should learn to hate all other classes as good Christians are taught to hate the Devil. They tell the members of the chosen class—the lowest in each unit of society—that all the other classes hate them with a consuming hatred and that they must hate back with a consuming hatred. They encourage each other in hate. They become obsessed by hate. Their fanaticism feeds on hate, class hatred, and beside them the wartime Prussian "was a babbling infant in the business of hating.
The result of this style of thinking along the narrowest possible groove and with the worst possible stimulant, is that the communist is in the field as much for revenge -upon the hated classes as for reform, even according to his own conception of reform. Torture and murder are too good for the aristocrat, the capitalist and the bourgeoisie. Slavery is too good for the peasant with his damnable hankering after his own bit of land and his own row of cabbages. Charity is weakness, and tolerance for any view which does not fit into the narrow Marxian creed is heresy. The good Bolshevik would be as ashamed to shudder at the sight of a bourgeois slaughter as a Spanish Inquisitor-General at the burning "Of a heretic. a symptom of doubt.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.