The fairness and justice of this judgment are demonstrated by the Bolsheviki themselves.  They denounced Kerensky’s government for not holding the elections for the Constituent Assembly sooner, posing as the champions of the Constituante.  When they had themselves assumed control of the government they delayed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly and then suppressed it by force of arms!  They denounced Kerensky for having restored the death penalty in the army in cases of gross treachery, professing an intense horror of capital punishment as a form of “bourgeois savagery.”  When they came into power they instituted capital punishment for civil and political offenses, establishing public hangings and floggings as a means of impressing the population![24] They had bitterly assailed Kerensky for his “militarism,” for trying to build up the army and for urging men to fight.  In less critical circumstances they themselves resorted to forced conscription.  They condemned Kerensky and his colleagues for “interfering with freedom of speech and press.”  When they came into power they suppressed all non-Bolshevist papers and meetings in a manner differing not at all from that of the Czar’s regime, forcing the other Socialist parties and groups to resort to the old pre-Revolution “underground” methods.

The evidence of all these things, and things even worse than these, is conclusive and unimpeachable.  It is contained in the records of the Bolshevik government, in its publications, and in the reports of the great Socialist parties of Russia, officially made to the International Socialist Bureau.  Surely the evidence sustains the charge that, whatever else they may or may not be, the Bolsheviki are not unbending and uncompromising idealists of the type of John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, as they are so often represented as being by well-meaning sentimentalists whose indulgence of the Bolsheviki is as unlimited as their ignorance concerning them.

Some day, perhaps, a competent psychologist will attempt the task of explaining the psychology of our fellow-citizens who are so ready to defend the Bolsheviki for doing the very things they themselves hate and condemn.  In any list of men and women in this country friendly to the Bolsheviki it will be found that they are practically all pacifists and anti-conscriptionists, while a great many are non-resistants and conscientious objectors to military service.  Practically all of them are vigorous defenders of the freedom of the press, of the right of public assemblage and of free speech.  With the exception of a few Anarchists, they are almost universally strong advocates of radical political democracy.  How can high-minded and intelligent men and women—­as many of them are—­holding such beliefs as these give countenance to the Bolsheviki, who bitterly and resolutely oppose all of them?  How can they denounce America’s adoption of conscription and say that it means that “Democracy is dead