1.  All lawyers except those engaged by the public authorities for the public service.

2.  All teachers and educators other than those engaged in the public service.

3.  All bankers, managers of industries, commercial travelers, experts, and accountants except those employed in the public service, or whose labor is judged by a competent tribunal to be necessary and useful.

4.  All editors, journalists, authors of books and plays, except as special provision might be provided for individuals.

5.  All persons engaged in occupations which a competent tribunal decided to classify as non-essential or non-productive.

Any serious attempt to introduce such restrictions and limitations of the right of suffrage in America would provoke irresistible revolt.  It would be justly and properly regarded as an attempt to arrest the forward march of the nation and to turn its energies in a backward direction.  It would be just as reactionary in the political world as it would be in the industrial world to revert back to hand-tool production; to substitute the ox-team for the railway system, the hand-loom for the power-loom, the flail for the threshing-machine, the sickle for the modern harvesting-machine, the human courier for the electric telegraph.

Yet we find a radical like Mr. Max Eastman giving his benediction and approval to precisely such a program in Russia as a substitute for universal suffrage.  We find him quoting with apparent approval an article setting forth Lenine’s plan, hardly disguised, to disfranchise every farmer who employs even a single hired helper.[54]

Lenine’s position is quite clear.  “Only the proletariat leading on the poorest peasants (the semi-proletariat as they are called in our program) ... may undertake the steps toward Socialism that have become absolutely unavoidable and non-postponable....  The peasants want to retain their small holdings and to arrive at some place of equal distribution....  So be it.  No sensible Socialist will quarrel with a pauper peasant on this ground.  If the lands are confiscated, so long as the proletarians rule in the great centers, and all political power is handed over to the proletariat, the rest will take care of itself."[55] Yet, in spite of Lenine’s insistence that all political power be “handed over to the proletariat,” in spite of a score of similar utterances which might be quoted, and, finally, in spite of the Soviet Constitution which so obviously excludes from the right to vote a large part of the adult population, an American Bolshevist pamphleteer has the effrontery to insult the intelligence of his readers by the stupidly and palpably false statement that “even at the present time 95 per cent. in Russia can vote, while in the United States only about 65 per cent. can vote."[56]

Of course it is only as a temporary measure that this dictatorship of a class is to be maintained.  It is designed only for the period of transition and adjustment.  In time the adjustment will be made, all forms of social parasitism and economic exploitation will disappear, and then it will be both possible and natural to revert to democratic government.  Too simple and naive to be trusted alone in a world so full of trickery and tricksters as ours are they who find any asurance in this promise.  They are surely among the most gullible of our humankind!