To the Editor of the "Norra-Cuina Dairy News."
Sir,—Now that Mr. Rodney Gilbert has finished his devastating attack on Bolshevism and his monition to our benighted ''intellestuals," may I venture to direct attention to a passage in Gouvernour Morris's famous despatch to George Washington written from' watts on April 20, 1789. I believe Mlarhe materials for a revolution Gilbert is an American.
in this country," the first American Minister to France under the Constitution is reporting on the French revolution for the information and guidance of his Government, "are very indifferent. Everybody agrees that there is an utter prostration of morals; but this general position can never convey to an American mind the degree of depravity. A hundred thousand examples are required to show the extreme rottenness. The virtuous stand forward from a background deeply and darkly shaded. From such crumbling matter, the great edifice of freedom is to be erected here. There is a perfect indifference to the violation of agreements. Inconstancy is mingled in the blood, marrow, and very essence of this people. The great mass of the people have no morals but their interest. These are the creatures who, led by drunken curates, are now in the high road @ la Liberté."
How curiously familiar it all sounds after reading the ponderings of the philopher who, greatly daring, essays to destroy a politi cal system in Russia and construct a new one in China? Mr. Gilbert is saying to-day of the Russian upheaval and, incidentally, of China in her present state precisely what a more powerful mind was uttering yesterday of that other upheaval which smashed the "Ancien Régime as completely as the Russian revolution has shattered the Tsardom or as the Chinese revolution has broken up the dynastic tradition in this country.
There was, however, another type of American mind in those days. "The liberty of the whole earth,' so the great Jefferson writes of the French transaction to Short on January 3, 1793, "was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated."" I wonder if Mr. Rodney Gilbert has ever heard that voice.
I am, etc,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.