not even restated his views in a summary of my own, lest into the summary might be injected some reflexes of my own critical thought.  Bolshevism is revealed in all its reactionary repulsiveness as something between which and absolute, individual dictatorial power there is “absolutely no contradiction in principle.”  It will not avail for our American followers and admirers of the Bolsheviki to plead that these things are temporary, compromises with the ideal due to the extraordinary circumstances prevailing in Russia, and to beg a mitigation of the severity of our judgment on that account.

The answer to the plea is twofold:  in the first place, they who offer it must, if they are sincere, abandon the savagely critical attitude they have seen fit to adopt toward our own government and nation because with “extraordinary conditions prevailing” we have had introduced conscription, unusual restrictions of movement and of utterance, and so forth.  How else, indeed, can their sincerity be demonstrated?  If the fact that extraordinary conditions justified Lenine and his associates in instituting a regime so tyrannical, what rule of reason or of morals must be invoked to refuse to count the extraordinary conditions produced in our own nation by the war as justification for the special measures of military service and discipline here introduced?

But there is a second answer to the claim which is more direct and conclusive.  It is not open to argument at all.  It is found in the words of Lenine himself, in his claim that there is absolutely no contradiction between the principle of individual dictatorship, ruling with iron hand, and the principle upon which Soviet government rests.  There has been no compromise here, for if there is no contradiction in principle no compromise could have been required.  Lenine is not afraid to make or to admit making compromises; he admits that compromises have been made.  It was a compromise to employ highly salaried specialists from the bourgeoisie, “a defection from the principles of the Paris Commune and of any proletarian rule,” as he says.  It was a compromise, another “defection from the only Socialist principle,” to admit the right of the co-operatives to determine their own conditions of membership.  Having made these declarations quite candidly, he takes pains to assure us that there was no such defection from principle in establishing the absolute rule of an individual dictator, that there was absolutely no contradiction in principle in this.[76]

Moreover, there is no reason for regarding this dictatorship as a temporary thing, if Lenine himself is to be accepted as an authoritative spokesman.  Obviously, if there is nothing in the principle of an absolute individual dictatorship which is in contradiction to the Bolshevik ideal, there can be no Bolshevik principle which necessarily requires for its realization the ending of such dictatorship.  Why, therefore, may it not be continued indefinitely?  Certainly, if the dictatorship is abolished it will not be—­if Lenine is to be seriously considered—­on account of its incompatibility with Bolshevik principles.