[263] This latter fact was doubtless known to the British government, which decided as early as March to recall the British troops from northern Russia.

[264] I published the facts in The Daily Telegraph, April 21, and The Public Ledger of Philadelphia, April 10, 1919.

[265] Colonel House is said to have dissociated himself from the President on this occasion.

[266] It was sent at the end of October, 1918, and to my knowledge was not published in full.

[267] Omsk, Ekaterinodar, Archangel, and the Crimea.  The last-named disappeared soon afterward.

[268] See Chapter IV “Censorship and Secrecy,” p. 132.

[269] Pertinax in L’Echo de Paris, July 5, 1919.

[270] This admission was made to a distinguished member of the Diplomatic Corps.

[271] In The Daily Telegraph, June 19, 1919, and in The Public Ledger of Philadelphia.

[272] In July M. Pichon told the Esthonian delegates that France recognized the independence of their country in principle.  But this declaration was not taken seriously, either by the Russians or by the French.

XI

BOLSHEVISM

What is Bolshevism?  A generic term that stands for a number of things which have little in common.  It varies with the countries where it appears.  In Russia it is the despotism of an organized and unscrupulous group of men in a disorganized community.  It might also be termed the frenzy of a few epileptics running amuck among a multitude of paralytics.  It is not so much a political doctrine or a socialist theory as a psychic disease of a section of the community which cannot be cured without leaving permanent traces and perhaps modifying certain organic functions of the society affected.  For some students at a distance who make abstraction from its methods—­as a critic appreciating the performance of “Hamlet” might make abstraction from the part of the Prince of Denmark—­it is a modification of the theory of Karl Marx, the newest contribution to latter-day social science.  In Russia, at any rate, the general condition of society from which it sprang was characterized not by the advance of social science, but by a psychic disorder the germs of which, after a century of incubation, were brought to the final phase of development by the war.  In its origins it is a pathological phenomenon.

Four and a half years of an unprecedented campaign which drained to exhaustion the financial and economic resources of the European belligerents upset the psychical equilibrium of large sections of their populations.  Goaded by hunger and disease to lawless action, and no longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness.  Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made