The sentiments of the people changed completely every few hundred miles.  After leaving Irkutsk we soon discovered that we were in enemy territory, and the few weeks, and in some cases days, that had elapsed since the retirement of the Bolshevik Commissars had left the country the prey of the desperado.  Let there be no mistake, Bolshevism lived by the grace of the old regime.  The peasant had his land, but the Russian workman had nothing.  Not one in a thousand could tell one letter of the alphabet from another.  He was entirely neglected by the State; there was not a single effective State law dealing with the labour conditions or the life of the worker in the whole Russian code.  His condition was, and will remain, in spite of the Revolution, utterly neglected and hopeless.  He has not the power to think or act for himself, and is consequently the prey of every faddist scamp who can string a dozen words together intelligently.  There are no trade unions, because there is no one amongst them sufficiently intelligent either to organise or manage them.  All the alleged representatives of Labour who have from time to time visited England pretending to represent the Russian workmen are so many deputational frauds.  There cannot be such a delegate from the very nature of things, as will be seen if the facts are studied on the spot.  The lower middle classes, especially the professional teacher class, have invented the figment of organised Russian labour for their own purpose.

The condition of the Russian workman is such that he can only formulate his grievances by employing others to do it for him.  Hence there has come into existence numerous professional councils, who for a consideration visit the workers in their homes and wherever they congregate, and compile their complaints and grievances.  But these professionals always point out that the rectification of small points like rates of wages and working hours are a waste of time and energy; that the real work is to leave the conditions so bad that, in sheer despair, the worker will rise and destroy capitalism in a night, and have a perfect millennium made ready for the next morning.

The poor, ignorant, uneducated, neglected Russian workman is perfect and well-prepared soil for such propaganda.  He found himself bound hand and foot in the meshes of this professional element, who did not belong to his class and, except in theory, knew nothing of his difficulties.  When this professional element had misled, bamboozled and deserted him, in a frenzy of despair he determined to destroy this thing called education, and made the ability to read and write one of the proofs of enmity to his class on the same principle that our uneducated workmen of the first half of the nineteenth century destroyed machinery and other progressive innovations, whose purpose they did not understand.  There would be less chatter about revolution if our people could only understand what it means to go through the horrors that have destroyed Russia and her people more effectively than the most ruthless invasion.