What is bolshevism? A Russian woman lately said that it was not a theory but a behavior. It is true that it is not so much a school of political philosophy as a career of crime. It makes its specious appeal on behalf of the poor and oppressed, but it arms them with fire and sword. Its red banner is the symbol of destruction. It is the enemy of the human race. It de rives its numerical strength from the criminal class which infests the underworld of every civilized community, and from the great mass of potential criminals, who are restrained only by the fear of the law, and who are ready to break out into predatory and homicidal activities as soon as anarchy has swept away the punitive power of justice. To these, of course, in countries such as Russia and Germany, must be added, as easily gained recruits, the uncounted numbers of men of the prole tariat, rendered desperate and disheartened by the sufferings of the war, by unrequited toil, famine, and pestilence. But bolshevism derives its inspiration -its motive power-not only from astute and unscruplous rogues, but also from educated but misguided fanatics, from sentimentalists, from sophomoric editors, and from occasional words of encouragement dropped by idealists in high places, heedless of the terrible forces their utterances may evoke. Bolshevists are the hyenas that slink upon the heels of the dogs of war. Wise men and patriotic men put themselves on

guard; they do not parley with hyenas under soft Marmorean skies.

If it is a theory at all, bolshevism means the dictatorship of the proletarians. The industrial and agricultural laborers and peasants must be vested with supreme and uncontrolled power. There shall be no government but their will, no laws but the resolutions of their committees. The peasants shall own all the land, and the workers all the factories. All other wealth shall be confiscated and either divided among the now dominant class or held in community. There shall be no courts of justice; a soviet will hear disputes, impose fines, and sentence to death. The newspapers must be suppressed. All the rest of the men, women, and children in the nation are classed as the "bourgeoisie." In this category are placed those who own any property, those who have not been accustomed to work with their hands, those who are educated, even all those who are suspected of any preference for public order, systematic government, personal decency, or the amenities of life. And the bourgeoisie must either submit or die. And they have been dying and are dying, in Russia, by the thousands. Quite frankly it is the purpose of the bolsheviki to reduce all other men to abject and helpless submission or else to exterminate them. That is the word and the only word which describes their program.

So far we have a theory which has advanced one step beyond anarchy. It

ers.

is class-hatred and class-war. But at least there is one class which is supposed to dominate and to direct the state. But if the besotted rank and file of this sanguinary cult imagine them selves to be masters of other men, or even of their own fate, they are ignorant of the intentions of their leadThere is to be a dictatorship of the proletariat, it is true, but the few who are in the lead intend to dictate to the dictators. Lenin, in his address to the "All-Russian Soviet Congress," did not hesitate to say: "How can we secure a strict unity of will? By subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one. This subjection, if the participants in the common work are ideally conscious and disciplined, may resemble the mild leading of an orchestra conductor; but may take the acute form of a dictatorship, if there is no ideal discipline and consciousness. Today the same revolution, and indeed in the interest of socialism, demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of those who direct the labor process." And so we come around again to autocracy; but it is now autocracy of a peculiarly brutal and revolting type.

What bolshevism has already done in Russia is too long and too painful a story for repetition here. But it may be summed up in brief. The revolutionists have confiscated the land, the banks, the mills and factories; they have repudiated the public debt; they have perpetrated robbery, murder, arson, public and private pillage, on a scale to which history records no paral

lel.

Everywhere it is the same paralysis of industry, ruin of commerce, theft, cruelty, assassination of their innocent victims by the uncounted thousands, starvation, death, chaos. They have abolished all the fundamental principles of liberty and of civilization. "In sentiment," says a writer in one of our newspapers, "bolshevism is an appeal that Lazarus shall be fed at the rich man's table, but in practice it is a brutal savagery which, like a wild beast, kills and tortures to vent its bestiality." "It is evident," says the New York Times, "that the French Reign of Terror was a mild and moderate exercise of authority by a government leaning culpably to the side of mercy, when contrasted with what is going on in Russia." And of Lenin the same paper remarks: "When his brief hour ends, he will have the satisfaction. of knowing that he did more harm to the human race than was ever done by one man in any such short time since history began to be recorded in the tombs along the Nile." Notwithstanding these unpalatable facts, there are still some exceedingly foolish persons in America who are doing no little harm by praising Lenin and Trotzky and their cutthroat associates as men of lofty ideals who are striving for the regeneration of the earth.

There is this much truth in it, that they have taken the round world as the field for their operations. They mean that their doctrines and their practices shall prevail in every country of the earth, including the United States. An eminently trustworthy witness before the Senate investigating committee, who was recently attached

to the staff of the American Embassy at Petrograd, testified as as follows: "They are working with all the devilishness they have to spread their doctrines throughout the world. As late as November 18, last, Lenin said in Moscow, and I have a copy of the statement with me, that they had sympathizers with great organizations behind them in Scandinavia, in Germany, in England, and in France. He also He also named this country as one of the targets they were aiming at. "The power that has crushed Germany,' he said, 'is also the power that will in the end crush England and the United States.' On another occasion and within the last few weeks, Lenin said that this year will decide whether or not bolshevism is to triumph in other parts of the world." It was well said by Gertrude Atherton: "The world has gone mad in spots after a great war before; but this spectacle of 3,000,000 men gorging themselves daily on blood and rapine and setting out to conquer the earth that they may excite themselves daily with new forms of torture is reserved for the twentieth century."

Throughout central Europe, the atmosphere of defeat and discouragement, the reactions caused by the prolonged sufferings of the war, and the toppling of the thrones of emperors, kings, and princelets, leaving the formation of new governments to be a mere scramble for power, created an ideal opportunity for the spread of the red propaganda. It was a case of the "house swept and garnished," and there entered the seven devils of bolshevism. In December, a well-in

formed correspondent telegraphed in these words: "Up through the European chaos is surely creeping the menace of bolshevism-not socialism, but that bolshevism which is the revengeful shadow of reckless, modern materialism. Only the imagery of the Apocalypse can do justice to the present state of Europe. It is not a political but a spiritual crisis. The victory of the maritime powers is an immense moral responsibility, because on the victors lies the task of saving and reconstructing all that is worth saving in civilization." The memory of what happened in Berlin is still fresh in our minds. The insurrection of the Spartacans (as the German bolshevists called themselves) was put down by force, but only after the destruction of millions of dollars' worth of property, the loss of several hundred lives, and the wounding of at least a thousand persons. Superior force prevailed, because a bolshevist with arms is out to kill, and while he is never open to argument, his flesh is pervious to machine-gun bullets.

Meanwhile the insidious virus is working in the veins of other peoples. Rumania flames up in revolt. Bolshevist propagandists have been very active there. There is a formidable riot in Bucharest. The palace is besieged; the royal family are fired upon, and the king is wounded. In Switzerland there is discovered a hotbed of intrigue. Attempts are made to corrupt that selfrespecting people by the circulation of inflammatory literature, by personal canvassing, by the lavish use of money, by threats, and by diplomatic ultimatums from Petrograd. With great dif

ficulty Switzerland escapes the net, but not without alarming and insistent demands for the revision of the Swiss constitution. There are outbreaks in Portugal-preceding, but not connected with the attempted royalist counterrevolution. Oporto is occupied by "democrats" and bands of guerrillas. Many are killed and wounded when troops are sent to the city to restore order. The Scandinavian kings are clinging desperately to their tottering thrones. The Soviet government maintains an envoy at Stockholm, apparently abundantly supplied with money and everything else he needs for his task of regenerating Sweden. In despatches of a month or two ago we read: "From Russia bolshevik money is pouring in. At Haparanda on the Finnish frontier, have been unearthed 50,000 proclamations in illiterate Swedish, all of them printed at Petrograd, and there is even talk, when the reds have re-conquered Finland, as they hope to do, of an army of Russians coming to help their Swedish fellow reds. And Sweden is so frightened at the prospect that her police are making a minute inventory of every foreigner in the kingdom, and they threaten ruthlessly to expel every man who cannot prove that he is not a bolshevist.

Denmark's bolshevists, though less numerous than Sweden's, are even more aggressive and confident. They, too, have Russian money and Russian propaganda in fact, redflagged bolshevik propaganda ships actually anchor in Copenhagen harbor. In Norway there are practically no moderate socialists. Bolshevism dominates the official socialist party and sits supreme in the socialist headquarters.

The bolsheviks, of course, demanded Haakon's overthrow, and of course also the formation of soldiers' and workmen's councils, which would hold all power. But the fact that all Norwegian socialists are bolshevik frightened all Norwegians who were not socialists, and as a result they turned out solidly at the autumn general election and voted for the conservatives."

England has not been untainted. More than a year ago, Cardinal Bourne gave solemn warning of a coming crisis, predicting a social upheaval as one of the results of the war. Sidney Brooks, certainly a well-informed publicist and not given to exaggeration, says: "The hubbub over syndicalism and collectivism and the revolution and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has been far more widely spread in Great Britain than most people are aware; and it has resulted in the growth of a definite school of working-class opinion which aims avowedly at the overthrow of the capitalist system, which regards property as robbery, which openly proclaims a class war, and which denies with passion that employers and employed ever have had or ever can have any interests in common." One of our own socialists of the saner sort goes even further in his testimony. "In England," says Charles Edward Russell, "there is a distinct organized movement already, participated in by men and women of distinction, to introduce the soviet; and in every recent labor conference, there have been outspoken expressions of bolshevist sympathy." There can be no doubt whatever that the recent outbreak of most menacing strikes in London and elsewhere in

England was stimulated, if not actually caused, by the active agents of the bolshevists, who, as was well known, had been circulating among the workers and spreading their pernicious doctrines. And in Ireland, to add to the distractions of that unhappy people, a secret, underground, but very active propaganda of Russian revolutionism is at work. It is described by a correspondent as "a case of crime camouflaged as politics. It is a case of crime seeking a chance to lay foundations for its work by taking advantage of democracy's traditional passion for liberty." And in France, the other day, if the cowardly hand which aimed a blow at the life of the venerated Clemenceau was not guided from Russia, at least its dastard act was prompted by a bolshevist heart.

Who shall set limits to the ambitions of such men as Lenin and Trotzky? A despatch from London advises that: "The Russian bolshevik government for a long time has been organizing an extensive propaganda for revolutions in China, India, and Persia, and is now ready, as soon as the opportunity offers, to send agents with large sums of money to stir up trouble throughout Asia." Does all this seem very remote from sane and liberty-loving America? Well, let us bring the tableau a little nearer home.

In the middle of January, general strikes, accompanied by rioting, organized attacks on churches, convents, hotels, and public buildings, broke out in Buenos Aires. The disorder was suppressed, the military and police forces being aided, so we read, by several

hundred student volunteers, a machinegun company, and patrols of "civilian guards with rifles and drawn revolvers." But about 800 persons lost their lives, and not less than 5,000 were injured, of whom 1,500 received treatment in the hospitals. Chiefly from the confessions of some of the prisoners, the police of Buenos Aires and of Montevideo were able to put together all the details of the plot which underlay this outbreak. It was instigated and engineered by Russian revolutionaries and native sympathizers. It was purely and simply a bolshevist uprising. There was an elaborate plan to overthrow the existing governments in both Argentina and Uruguay, and to set up soviet governments in both countries. So sure were the conspirators of their success that they had already selected the chief officials for their new states. And these men, by the way, were among those put under arrest. And what was Argentina's answer to this violent assault

upon her integrity and peace? Let the simple words of a press despatch from

Buenos Aires answer: "Fourteen hun

dred prisoners charged with maximalist activities are on board a cruiser here awaiting deportation. The majority of them are Russian Jews."

Still nearer to the United States creeps the black shadow of organized anarchy and crime. No, that is a mistake. It is already upon us. The poison is in our blood this day. And it must be admitted with shame that there was already a taint which permitted the deadly infusion. There are not wanting prophets to tell us that bolshevism can gain no headway in the United States; that our workingmen are pros