Of course, this does not mean that we are to judge result wholly without regard to aim.  Admirable intention is still admirable as intention, even when untoward circumstance defeats it and brings deplorable results.  Bolshevism is not merely a body of belief and speculation.  When the Bolsheviki seized the government of Russia and began to attempt to carry out their ideas, Bolshevism became a living movement in a world of reality and subject to the acid test of pragmatic criteria.  It must be judged by such a matter-of-fact standard as the extent to which it has enlarged or diminished the happiness, health, comfort, freedom, well-being, satisfaction, and efficiency of the greatest number of individuals.  Unless the test shows that it has increased the sum of good available for the mass, Bolshevism cannot be regarded as a gain.  If, on the contrary, the test shows that it has resulted in sensibly diminishing the sum of good available to the greatest number of people, Bolshevism must be counted as a move in the wrong direction, as so much effort lost.  Nothing that can be urged on philosophical or moral grounds for or against the moral or intellectual impulses that prompted it can fundamentally change the verdict.  Yet, for all that, it is well to examine the theory which inspires the practice; well to know the manner and method of thinking, and the view of life, from which Bolshevism as a movement of masses of men and women proceeds.

Theoretically, Bolshevism, as such, has no necessary connection with the philosophy or the program of Socialism.  Certain persons have established a working relation between Socialism, a program, and Bolshevism, a method.  The connection is not inherently logical, but, on the contrary, wholly adventitious.  As a matter of fact, Bolshevism can only be linked to the program of Socialism by violently and disastrously weakening the latter and destroying its fundamental character.  We shall do well to remember this; to remember that the method of action, and, back of the method, the philosophy on which it rests and from which it springs, are separate and distinct from Socialism.  They are incalculably older and they have been associated with vastly different programs.  All that is new in Bolshevism is that a very old method of action, and a very old philosophy of action, have been seized upon by a new class which attempts to unite them to a new program.

That is all that is implied in the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”  Dictatorship by small minorities is not a new political phenomenon.  All that is new when the minority attempting to establish its dictatorship is composed of poor, propertyless people, is the fact of their economic condition and status.  That is the only difference between the dictatorship of Russia by the Romanov dynasty and the dictatorship of Russia by a small minority of determined, class-conscious working-people.  It is not only the precise forms of oppressive power used by them that are identically characteristic of Czarism and Bolshevism, but their underlying philosophy.  Both forms of dictatorship rest upon the philosophy of might as the only valid right.  Militarism, especially as it was developed under Prussian leadership, has exactly the same philosophy and aims at the same general result, namely, to establish the domination and control of society by a minority class.  The Bolsheviki have simply inverted Czarism and Militarism.