Parliamentary government cannot exist except upon the basis of the will of the majority.  Whoever enters into the parliamentary struggle, therefore, must hope and aim to convert the majority.  Back of that hope and aim must be faith in the intellectual and moral capacity of the majority.  At the foundation of Bolshevist theory and practice lies the important fact that there is no such faith, and, consequently, neither the hope nor the aim to convert the majority and with its strength make the Revolution.  Out of the adult population of Russia at that time approximately 85 per cent. were peasants and less than 5 per cent. belonged to the industrial proletariat.  At that time something like 70 per cent. of the people were illiterate.  Even in St. Petersburg—­where the standard of literacy was higher than in any other city—­not more than 55 per cent. of the people could sign their own names in 1905, according to the most authentic government reports.  When we contemplate such facts as these can we wonder that impatient revolutionaries should shrink from attempting the task of converting a majority of the population to an intelligent acceptance of Socialism?

There was another reason besides this, however.  Lenine—­and he personifies Bolshevism—­was, and is, a doctrinaire Marxist of the most dogmatic type conceivable.  As such he believed that the new social order must be the creation of that class which is the peculiar product of modern capitalism, the industrial proletariat.  To that class alone he and his followers pinned all their faith and hope, and that class was a small minority of the population and bound to remain a minority for a very long period of years.  Here, then, we have the key.  It cannot be too strongly stressed that the Bolsheviki did not base their hope upon the working class of Russia, and did not trust it.  The working class of Russia—­if we are to use the term with an intelligent regard to realities—­was and is mainly composed of peasants; the industrial proletariat was and is only a relatively small part of the great working class of the nation. But it is upon that small section, as against the rest of the working class, that Bolshevism relies.

Lenine has always refused to include the peasants in his definition of the working class.  With almost fanatical intensity he has insisted that the peasant, together with the petty manufacturer and trader, would soon disappear; that industrial concentration would have its counterpart in a great concentration of landownings and agriculture; that the small peasant holdings would be swallowed up by large, modern agricultural estates, with the result that there would be an immense mass of landless agricultural wage-workers.  This class would, of course, be a genuinely proletarian class, and its interests would be identical with those of the industrial proletariat.  Until that time came it would be dangerous to rely upon the peasants, he urged, because their instincts are bourgeois rather than proletarian.  Naturally, he has looked askance at the peasant Socialist movements, denying that they were truly Socialist at all.  They could not be Socialist movements in the true sense, he contended, because they lacked the essential quality of true Socialists, namely, proletarian class consciousness.