the Moscow government on the nationalization of industry after the opening experiment had broken down contains data enough to enable one to affirm that Lenin himself judged Marxism inapplicable even to Russia, and left it where he had found it—­among the ideals of a millennial future.  That ukase ordered the gradual nationalization of all private industries with a capital of not less than one million rubles, but allowed the owners to enjoy the gratuitous usufruct of the concern, provided that they financed and carried it on as before.  Consequently, although in theory the business was transferred to the state, in reality the capitalist retained his place and his profits as under the old system.  Consequently, the principal aims of socialism, which are the distribution of the proceeds of industry among the community and the retention of a certain surplus by the state, were missed.  In the Bolshevist procedure the state is wholly eliminated except for the purpose of upholding a fiction.  It receives nothing from the capitalist, not even a royalty.

The Slav is a dreamer whose sense of the real is often defective.  He loses himself in vague generalities and pithless abstractions.  Thus, before opening a school he will spin out a theory of universal education, and then bemoan his lack of resources to realize it.  True, many of the chiefs of the sect—­for it is undoubtedly a sect when it is not a criminal conspiracy, and very often it is both—­were not Slavs, but Jews, who, for the behoof of their kindred, dropped their Semitic names and adopted sonorous Slav substitutes.  But they were most unscrupulous peculators, incapable of taking an interest in the scientific aspect of such matters, and hypnotized by the dreams of lucre which the opportunity evoked.  One has only to call to mind some of the shabby transactions in which the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, Kuhn, or Cohen, and Braunstein (Trotzky) of Petrograd, took an active part.  The former is said to have offered for sale the historic crown of St. Stephen of Hungary—­which to him was but a plain gold headgear adorned with precious stones and a jeweled cross—­to an old curiosity dealer of Munich,[278] and when solemnly protesting that he was living only for the Soviet Republic and was ready to die for it, he was actively engaged in smuggling out of Hungary into Switzerland fifty million kronen bonds, thirty-five kilograms of gold, and thirty chests filled with objects of value.[279] His colleague Szamuelly’s plunder is a matter of history.

To such adventurers as those science is a drug.  They are primitive beings impressible mainly to concrete motives of the barest kind.  The dupes of Lenin were people of a different type.  Many of them fancied that the great political clash must inevitably result in an equally great and salutary social upheaval.  This assumption has not been borne out by events.