This is a nightmare hypothesis, but the difficulties of the practical problem seem to warrant its entertainment.  The number of people in Russia who can even read and write is extremely small, the need to get them employed industrially as rapidly as possible is very great, hence the system of education which develops out of this situation cannot be very ambitious or enlightened.  Further it will have to continue over a sufficiently long period of time to allow of the risk of its becoming stable and traditional.  In adult education already the pupil comes for a short period, learns Communism, reading and writing—­there is hardly time to give him much more—­and returns to leaven the army or his native village.  In achieving this the Bolsheviks are already doing a very important and valuable work, but they cannot hope for a long while to become the model of public instruction which they have hitherto been represented to be.  And the conditions of their becoming so ultimately are adherence to their ideals through a very long period of stress, and a lessening of fanaticism in their Communist teaching, conditions which, unhappily, seem to be mutually incompatible.

The whole of the argument set out in this chapter may be summed up in the statement of one fact which the mere idealist is prone to overlook, namely that Russia is a country at a stage in economic development not much more advanced than America in the pioneer days.  The old civilization was aristocratic and exotic; it could not survive in the modern world.  It is true that it produced great men, but its foundations were rotten.  The new civilization may, for the moment, be less productive of individual works of genius, but it has a new solidity and gives promise of a new unity.  It may be that I have taken too hopeful a view and that the future evolution of Russia will have as little connection with the life and tradition of its present population as modern America with the life of the Red Indian tribes.  The fact that there exists in Russia a population at a far higher stage of culture, which will be industrially educated, not exterminated, militates against this hypothesis, but the need for education may make progress slower than it was in the United States.

One would not have looked for the millennium of Communism, nor even for valuable art and educational experiment in the America of early railroading and farming days.  Nor must one look for such things from Russia yet.  It may be that during the next hundred years there, economic evolution will obscure Communist ideals, until finally, in a country that has reached the stage of present-day America, the battle will be fought out again to a victorious and stable issue.  Unless, indeed, the Marxian scripture prove to be not infallible, and faith and heroic devotion show themselves capable of triumphing over economic necessity.

V

COMMUNISM AND THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION