that leads men to appraise everything by its money value, and to determine money value often merely by the caprices of idle plutocrats.  It promises a world where all men and women shall be kept sane by work, and where all work shall be of value to the community, not only to a few wealthy vampires.  It is to sweep away listlessness and pessimism and weariness and all the complicated miseries of those whose circumstances allow idleness and whose energies are not sufficient to force activity.  In place of palaces and hovels, futile vice and useless misery, there is to be wholesome work, enough but not too much, all of it useful, performed by men and women who have no time for pessimism and no occasion for despair.

The existing capitalist system is doomed.  Its injustice is so glaring that only ignorance and tradition could lead wage-earners to tolerate it.  As ignorance diminishes, tradition becomes weakened, and the war destroyed the hold upon men’s minds of everything merely traditional.  It may be that, through the influence of America, the capitalist system will linger for another fifty years; but it will grow continually weaker, and can never recover the position of easy dominance which it held in the nineteenth century.  To attempt to bolster it up is a useless diversion of energies which might be expended upon building something new.  Whether the new thing will be Bolshevism or something else, I do not know; whether it will be better or worse than capitalism, I do not know.  But that a radically new order of society will emerge, I feel no doubt.  And I also feel no doubt that the new order will be either some form of Socialism or a reversion to barbarism and petty war such as occurred during the barbarian invasion.  If Bolshevism remains the only vigorous and effective competitor of capitalism, I believe that no form of Socialism will be realized, but only chaos and destruction.  This belief, for which I shall give reasons later, is one of the grounds upon which I oppose Bolshevism.  But to oppose it from the point of view of a supporter of capitalism would be, to my mind, utterly futile and against the movement of history in the present age.

The effect of Bolshevism as a revolutionary hope is greater outside Russia than within the Soviet Republic.  Grim realities have done much to kill hope among those who are subject to the dictatorship of Moscow.  Yet even within Russia, the Communist party, in whose hands all political power is concentrated, still lives by hope, though the pressure of events has made the hope severe and stern and somewhat remote.  It is this hope that leads to concentration upon the rising generation.  Russian Communists often avow that there is little hope for those who are already adult, and that happiness can only come to the children who have grown up under the new regime and been moulded from the first to the group-mentality that Communism requires.  It is only after the lapse of a generation that they hope to create a Russia that shall realize their vision.