“It is to be for the good of humanity, not business,” one of them, an American, said, “and the kids represent the future.  Our generation is to have only the labor, the joy, and the misery of the struggle.  We will get none of the material benefits of the new system, and we will probably never all understand and like it.  But the children—­it is for them and their children that we are fighting, so we are giving them the best of it from the start, and teaching them to take it all naturally.  They are getting the idea.  They are to be our new propagandists.”

The idea is that everybody is to work for the common good, and so, as the children and the American prisoners note, when they all produce more, they all get more.  They are starving now, but they are sharing their poverty.  And they really are sharing it.  Lenin eats, like everybody else—­only one meal a day—­soup, fish, bread, and tea.  He has to save out of that a bit for breakfast and another bit for supper.  The people, the peasants, send him more, but he puts it in the common mess.  So the heads of this government do not have to imagine the privations of the people; they feel them.  And so the people and the government realize that, if ever Russia becomes prosperous, all will share in the wealth, exactly as they share in the poverty now.  In a word, rich Russia expects to become a rich Russian people.

This, then, is the idea which has begun to catch the imagination of the Russian people.  This it is that is making men and women work with a new interest, and a new incentive, not to earn high wages and short hours, but to produce an abundance for all.  This is what is making a people, sick of war, send their ablest and strongest men into the new, high-spirited, hard-drilled army to defend, not their borders, but their new working system of common living.

And this is what is making Lenin and his sobered communist government ask for peace.  They think they have carried a revolution through for once to the logical conclusion.  All other revolutions have stopped when they had revolved through the political phase to political democracy.  This one has turned once more clear through the economic phase to economic democracy, to self-government in the factory, shop, and on the land, and has laid a foundation for universal profit sharing, for the universal division of food, clothes, and all goods, equally among all.  And they think their civilization is working on this foundation.  They want time to go on and build it higher and better.  They want to spread it all over the world, but only as it works, As they told us when we reminded them that the world dreaded their propaganda: 

“We are through with the old propaganda of argument.  All we ask now is to be allowed to prove by the examples of things well done here in Russia, that the new system is good.  We are so sure we shall make good, that we are willing to stop