I hate to speak slightingly of anyone, but these world-revolutionaries have no business to be so young.  According to my view a professor of anarchy and assassination ought to be a man of middle-age with stiff stubble on his chin.  He has no business to be a pale and perspiring youth, tending to long back hair and apt to be startled by the slightest sound when he is alone.  And what a lot of them write poetry, and such poetry too!  That is the manner of the man who is going to seize your house and usurp your cow, while you will be lucky if you are allowed a place on a perch in your own fowl-house.

We had an opportunity of seeing them in procession when a consignment of these world-revolutionaries drove off in state from Berne about the time of the Armistice.  I told you, last week, that we had a Legation of them, very kindly lent by the Moscow management, and I also told you that our Italian juggler had let us into the secret of their midnight lucubrations, of which we had duly informed the officials interested in such matters.  We had front places when the motor lorry called for them and the military escort arrived to assist all the passengers to take, and keep, their seats.  Into the lorry were packed the Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary, the Charge d’Affaires, the First Secretary, the Second Secretary, the Third Secretary, the Legal and Spiritual Advisers and the Lady Typist.  Their features were not easy to distinguish; when the Bolshevists assume dominion over us they will not nationalize our soap.  One or two fell out, but were carefully replaced by willing hands and bayonets; and so home.

Now that is a sight you don’t often see:  a Diplomatique Corps being returned to store in a motor lorry.  The disappointing thing about them was that, for all their fiery propaganda and for all their drastic resolutions, never a one of them produced so much as a squib-cracker.  The only people to derive any excitement from the affair were the small children, who took it for a circus.

The best they could do for us was a general strike.  What all this had to do with trades or unions nobody seemed to know, least of all the workers.  But there was an attractive sound about the then novel phrase, “Direct Action,” and it gave a sense of useful business to that otherwise over-portly word, “Proletariat.”  And the local politicians, promised good jobs in LENIN’S millennium, made great use of the phrase, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”  Thus many an honest workman joined in under the belief that it meant an extra hour’s holiday on Saturdays, an extra hour in bed on Mondays and an extra bob or two of wages.