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together, only numbered forty thousand. The Trades Unions and Co-operators were against them. Their one strength was the sincerity, and even fanaticism, with which they preached their own application of Marxism. When they seized power in November 1917, there was no sense in their existence as a Party, unless they set to work to realise their principles, and this they did in the most whole-hearted way. The result was a complete smash of the economic life of the country, as must follow in any other country where the same attempt is madewith this difference, that in those communities which draw their life from industry, the collapse will be final. The one saving consideration in Russia was that, industry being relatively so unimportant, the country could drag on until the same principles, with even less forethought, were applied also to agriculture. Then came the final crash, with Lenin's frank and undisguised 'economic retreat,' which, as he himself plainly avowed, was forced upon him by the peasants, who constitute some 85 per cent. of the population.

Lenin was honest about it; the Report is the reverse. All through it, or rather through the part credited by the preface to Mr Young (one hardly meets the phrase elsewhere), the whole period of Bolshevist collapse, one of the most tragic and impressive breakdowns in history, is labelled with the phrase War Communism'! In other words, the reader is given to understand that the Communists-who were known for nothing else than their Communism-applied it only when attacked, and only because military conditions compelled them to do 80. This is a gross misrepresentation, and here the professor's possible absence in Portugal is not an excuse. Meanwhile one only needs to read a single number of any Communist newspaper during the period of that so-called 'War Communism' to realise this monstrous perversion.

It is only in this way that the Report could arrive at its Conclusions.' · Communism is not Communism but something else called 'War Communism,' reluctantly applied by the Communists. As soon as a wicked world has allowed them, the Communists have ceased to apply it, and Communism has come to be something different from War Communism, with this small reservation, that

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power in the country is still restricted to that insig. wit nificant minority whose programme has been so catas trophically exploded; and the country accepts' the pol destroyers as the best possible of reconstructors, giving ter the sanction of silence to their autocratic control in return for other benefits, than freedom,' among which the Bolsheviks appropriate practically everything that was done before them by the freely elected Zemstva.

It is not only Mr Young who has to stand on his head in order to arrive at this explanation. The Communists themselves are in exactly the same predicament. 'We used to think,' said a good judge, himself an ardent revolutionist, three years ago (that is, soon after the inception of the retreat from Communism), 'that these men would die a violent death; now we see that their punishment is more ironical.' The Communists remain in power, in the void of public spirit which they have created, but without Communism. No doubt, it is by the best and sincerest of them that this punishment is most keenly felt. Much in their position resembles that of Robespierre, when, his programme shrunk to a sheer negation, he had little left except the weapons he had borrowed from the repertory of the old régime, and little use left to make of them except to secure as long as possible his continuance in power. A wholesale massacre has been carried out; the figures become more impressive, not less so, as one is able to get nearer to the facts, and indeed have often been announced, even exaggerated, by the Bolsheviks; Lenin himself declared that the destruction of the Bourgeois class (whatever that is) would not cost more lives than the world war. And at the end the men who have done all this, whose only possible justification of themselves was that they were absolutely in the right in their object, have to renounce the application of the theories which were, and apparently still are, the breath of their existence. Any honest mind was bound to seek some way out of this intolerable impasse. Communists have found one in the hope that after all their bankrupt ideas may get a new lease of life, if they can only use the power that remains to them to see that the new generation shall have none other. Hence the 'ideological front' (all Bolshevist terminology is militarist), the fight with ideas,

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thwith the gods of heaven, accompanied by the logical persecution of religion, and the expulsion of even nonpolitical professors. In the silence imposed by Party terrorism, it is the 'Non-Party' that is now the chief renemy, that is to say, the rest of the world outside the small Communistic brotherhood, which, in face of the contradictions forced upon it by hard facts, is now breaking asunder inside. This is the explanation of the latest adventures of the alert Trotsky, who has twice slightly opened the Communist door to have a look at the weather outside, and see if the time were ripe for something new. This last operation' of militant Communism, the war on ideas, is the most hopeless of all. Tradition, character, and training may, indeed, be broken down for a time, but no teaching that prescribes in advance the 'conclusions' to be reached by the student can produce anything in the realm of ideas but a negation. Communism is throughout infinitely more important than the individual Communists. Communism has failed. The Communists are terribly worn out with their tremendous attempt to impose the ideas of some ten people on so many recalcitrant millions, and will probably die earlier than other people, without having succeeded in creating any successors with the same convictions and the driving power that they at the outset possessed.

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And what shall we say of Russia? The very name has been eliminated from the title of the State; yet Russia is the one permanent value that remains. Potential political opposition has been destroyed in advance, and the whole country is sick of politics and parties of every kind. Yet the one thing which centuries of Tsarism taught to perfection, was the art of silent but effective evasion. The picture which one of those who are best informed as to present-day Russia gives is this. It is as if there were a general and unorganised conspiracy not to challenge by outspoken protests the one weapon left to the defeated conquerors, terrorism; but to go one's way, and to follow one's instincts in the assurance that there will never be enough prohibitors to prohibit with effect. The actual life of the country drifts away from under the feet of the theorists. They remain in authority, with no hope of salvation left,

except the success of their theory in countries other than their own.

This is the stage at which enters the British Trades Union Delegation, with Mr Young and the Soviet Government for its guide. Let us say at once that when these industrial workers were shown, for instance, the plant of a factory or a mine, their comments prove clearly that they well understand what they are talking about; but there is a striking lack of inter-relation between their simple comments of a general kind, often full of the strange misunderstandings of the escorted visiting party, and the logic, the thorough-going tactics, of the main text of the Report and the 'Conclusions,' which they were invited to sign. There is something pathetic, too, in their impotent little essays at independence; as when a number of obvious foreigners, who can only speak through some interpreter, make a 'surprise' visit to the citadel of Tiflis and convince themselves by a talk with the sentries that nothing too unkind is being done to the ousted fellow-thinkers of Mr Ramsay MacDonald. Mr Purcell catechises-rather sharply, it would appear-the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in prison, and gets from some-as it was not difficult to arrange-something in the nature of a recantation; and the Delegation (p. 16) mildly suggests to its hosts the desirability of showing more 'clemency to those who are guilty of not sharing their political opinions.

At one point in the Delegates' Report, we are assured 'that there appears to have been no actual persecution of the clergy, as such' (p. 105). Their hosts have themselves avowed in print that they have executed one hundred bishops and one thousand priests. It will hardly be suggested that this was an excess of zeal, that half the number might have been allowed. The matter is passed off very lightly with the explanation that all this was probably punishment for opposition to the Government, which under this particular form of autocracy is an unpardonable crime. We are here face to face with one of the greatest and most authenticated tragedies of modern times. Bishops and priests have gone to their deaths because they refused to obey a law of the triumphant minority, that no one should teach

tris the Christian faith to any one under eighteen years of

age, a decree of the Communist leaders made in a deeply tish religious country in order to clear away all hindrances the to the Communist education of children of which the On Report gives convincing testimony. Yet those who stand firm,' writes one of the most spiritual of Russian Ent priests, and endure persecution and poverty, are tempered and illumined to great beauty; and martyrs bear their testimony of the Russian people before the throne of God.'

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With the setting provided, the Delegation arrives easily enough at the desired Conclusions.' At the first meeting, the Judicial Commission which is here to supplant the inaction of the British Government in the matter, opens its investigations of the Zinoviev letter by the exchange of a kiss between its chairman, Mr Purcell, and the accused Zinoviev. Mr Young or Mr McDonell copies out long tables of Soviet statistics, while even during their visit, the Communist press, which only two or three of the investigators can, and evidently do not, read, is giving a totally different and far more pessimistic picture of the matters in question. Zinoviev is publicly acquitted of any unkind designs against the constitution of our country, while he is revelling in their public repetition. With the stage thus set, the visitors pass through a simple course of reasoning which has nothing to do with the facts. The Communists overthrew the Tsar and put an end to barbarism; any one who opposed them must have been a Tsarist. The outside world, in spite of the presence in Russia of more foreigners than at any other time, was entirely misinformed, while it sought to destroy the people's government. The Communists in self-defence had to resort to the practice of Communism. As the Tsar had ruined the country, the Communists had to set about restoring it. In this work, they have already made great progress, and in many respects are really ahead of the rest of the world. For this we have their own word to go upon; any other statements of a more critical kind, even though often to be found in the papers run by themselves, must be capitalist lies. In Communist hands Russia is fully entitled to our confidence, and is a very profitable investment. Our money