is one reason why their autocratic dictatorship is acceptable.  They have felt, they shared the passion of the mob to destroy, but they had something in mind to destroy.

     The soviet leaders used the revolution to destroy the system
     of organized Russian life.

While the mobs broke windows, smashed wine cellars, and pillaged buildings to express their rage, their leaders directed their efforts to the annihilation of the system itself.  They pulled down the Tsar and his officers; they abolished the courts, which had been used to oppress them; they closed shops, stopped business generally, and especially all competitive and speculative business; and they took over all the great industries, monopolies, concessions, and natural resources.  This was their purpose.  This is their religion.  This is what the lower-class culture has been slowly teaching the people of the world for 50 years:  that it is not some particular evil, but the whole system of running business and railroads, shops, banks, and exchanges, for speculation and profit that must be changed.  This is what causes poverty and riches, they teach, misery, corruption, vice, and war.  The people, the workers, or their State, must own and run these things “for service.”

Not political democracy, as with us; economic democracy is the idea; democracy in the shop, factory, business.  Bolshevism is a literal interpretation, the actual application of this theory, policy, or program.  And so, in the destructive period of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik leaders led the people to destroy the old system, root and branch, fruit and blossom, too.  And apparently this was done.  The blocks we saw in Petrograd and Moscow of retail shops nailed up were but one sign of it.  When we looked back of these dismal fronts and inquired more deeply into the work of the revolution we were convinced that the Russians have literally and completely done their job.  And it was this that shocked us.  It is this that has startled the world; not the atrocities of the revolution, but the revolution itself.

     The organization of life as we know it in America, in the
     rest of Europe, in the rest of the world, is wrecked and
     abolished in Russia.

     The revolution didn’t do it.  The Tsar’s Government had
     rotted it.  The war broke down the worn-out machinery of it;
     the revolution has merely scrapped it finally.

The effect is hunger, cold, misery, anguish, disease—­death to millions.  But worse than these—­I mean this—­was the confusion of mind among the well and the strong.  We do not realize, any of us—­even those of us who have imagination—­how fixed our minds and habits are by the ways of living that we know.  So with the Russians.  They understood how to work and live under their old system; it was not a pretty one; it was dark, crooked, and dangerous, but they had groped around