Is it possible to effect a fundamental reform of the existing economic system by any other method than that of Bolshevism?  The difficulty of answering this question is what chiefly attracts idealists to the dictatorship of the proletariat.  If, as I have argued, the method of violent revolution and Communist rule is not likely to have the results which idealists desire, we are reduced to despair unless we call see hope in other methods.  The Bolshevik arguments against all other methods are powerful.  I confess that, when the spectacle of present-day Russia forced me to disbelieve in Bolshevik methods, I was at first unable to see any way of curing the essential evils of capitalism.  My first impulse was to abandon political thinking as a bad job, and to conclude that the strong and ruthless must always exploit the weaker and kindlier sections of the population.  But this is not an attitude that can be long maintained by any vigorous and temperamentally hopeful person.  Of course, if it were the truth, one would have to acquiesce.  Some people believe that by living on sour milk one can achieve immortality.  Such optimists are answered by a mere refutation; it is not necessary to go on and point out some other way of escaping death.  Similarly an argument that Bolshevism will not lead to the millennium would remain valid even if it could be shown that the millennium cannot be reached by any other road.  But the truth in social questions is not quite like truth in physiology or physics, since it depends upon men’s beliefs.  Optimism tends to verify itself by making people impatient of avoidable evils; while despair, on the other hand, makes the world as bad as it believes it to be.  It is therefore imperative for those who do not believe in Bolshevism to put some other hope in its place.

I think there are two things that must be admitted:  first, that many of the worst evils of capitalism might survive under Communism; secondly, that the cure for these evils cannot be sudden, since it requires changes in the average mentality.

What are the chief evils of the present system?  I do not think that mere inequality of wealth, in itself, is a very grave evil.  If everybody had enough, the fact that some have more than enough would be unimportant.  With a very moderate improvement in methods of production, it would be easy to ensure that everybody should have enough, even under capitalism, if wars and preparations for wars were abolished.  The problem of poverty is by no means insoluble within the existing system, except when account is taken of psychological factors and the uneven distribution of power.