pale with terror, he was able to state that he had beheld the sea-bed peopled with human bodies standing upright, which the swaying of the water, still sensible at this shallow depth, softly rocked as though they were monstrous algae, their hair on end bristling vertically, and their arms raised toward the surface....  All these corpses, anchored to the bottom by the weight of stones, took on an appearance of eerie life resembling, one might say, a forest of trees moved from side to side by the wind and eager to welcome the diver come down among them....  There were, he added, old men, children numerous beyond count, so that one could but compare them to the trees of a forest."[282]

From published records it is known that the Bolshevist thugs, when tired of using the rifle, the machine-gun, the cord, and the bayonet, expedited matters by drowning their victims by hundreds in the Black Sea, in the Gulf of Finland, and in the great rivers.  Submarine cemeteries was the name given to these last resting-places of some of Russia’s most high-minded sons and daughters.[283] It is not in the French Revolution that those deeds of wanton destruction and revolting cruelty which are indissolubly associated with Bolshevism find a parallel, but in Chinese history, which offers a striking and curious prefiguration of the Leninist structure.[284] Toward the middle of the tenth century, when the empire was plunged in dire confusion, a mystical sect was formed there for the purpose of destroying by force every vestige of the traditional social fabric, and establishing a system of complete equality without any state organization whatever, after the manner advocated by Leo Tolstoy.  Some of the dicta of these sectarians have a decidedly Bolshevist flavor.  This, for example:  “Society rests upon law, property, religion, and force.  But law is injustice and chicane; property is robbery and extortion; religion is untruth, and force is iniquity.”  In those days Chinese political parties were at strife with each other, and none of them scorned any means, however brutal, to worst its adversaries, but for a long while they were divided among themselves and without a capable chief.

At last the Socialist party unexpectedly produced a leader, Wang Ngan Shen, a man of parts, who possessed the gift of drawing and swaying the multitude.  Of agreeable presence, he was resourceful and unscrupulous, soon became popular, and even captivated the Emperor, Shen Tsung, who appointed him Minister.  He then set about applying his tenets and realizing his dreams.  Wang Ngan Shen began by making commerce and trade a state monopoly, just as Lenin had done, “in order,” he explained, “to keep the poor from being devoured by the rich.”  The state was proclaimed the sole owner of all the wealth of the soil; agricultural overseers were despatched to each district to distribute the land among the peasants, each of these receiving as much as he and his family could cultivate.  The peasant obtained also the