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ere the Minority Socialists, who took their inspiration om Russia. They were beaten and turned out of the overnment by the Majority faction, which carefully voided any recognition of sovereign rights in the onstituent Lands.'

This question of translation cannot be dismissed as ne of mere verbal propriety, for the point of view from which the German system is regarded will be materially affected by the circumstance that it is called a Federation or an Empire, as the case may be. The truth seems to

be that neither of these words is quite apposite. An Empire does not necessarily imply an Emperor, or we could not speak of the British Empire; and it is, no doubt, In that elastic sense that the word Empire is used to ender the German word Reich' in the Versailles Treaty. But a federation implies constituent federative bodies, he character of which it simply reflects. A federation of academies should not include industrial corporations, or should a federation of industrials include academies. A federated State consists, strictly speaking, of contituent States with general legislative powers; and in uch a case the legislative powers conferred upon the Federation are expressly delegated, as in the case of the Australian Commonwealth and the United States of America. When the general legislative power is conFerred upon the central authority and only delegated powers of legislation are in the hands of the local ssemblies, as in the case of the Dominion of Canada or he Union of South Africa, the whole body politic cannot be accurately called a federation, for it is a federation of provinces; and, although a federation of provinces may be the basis of a State, the State erected on such a basis s & unitary not a federated State. The new Deutsche Reich resembles the Canadian, not the Australian, model this respect, inasmuch as full legislative authority esides in the Reichstag and only delegated legislative powers can be exercised by the Landtags.

The foregoing considerations would apply even if here were no historical considerations to be taken into ccount. But the circumstance has already been alluded o, that the exact nature of the Union was hotly debated the Constituent Assembly and throughout Germany when the name of the new State was being considered.

Three parties contended for three different views. Conservatives wished to erect a federation of sover States on the model of the Imperial Bund. The extr Socialists desired to erect a Federation of Workm and Soldiers' Councils. A third, which may be ca for lack of a better term, the Prussian Party, desire abolish historical boundaries and erect a unitary St The outcome was a compromise which resulted in official Deutsche Reich'; and, if in rendering the English the Treaty formula 'German Empire' is to cast overboard, it would seem better to substitute s equally vague term such as German Commonwea instead of the singularly inappropriate 'German Fed tion.' It is a point not to be ignored in this connex that the English word Commonwealth is very nearly etymological equivalent of the German Reich.'

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For the translation of the word 'Land' by 'St there is more to be said, for this word 'State' is use that sense in the Treaty of Versailles. But, as the sta of these 'Lands' had not at that time been settled, it doubtful whether they would become States in a federation or provinces in a unitary State. The langu of the Treaty is perhaps not quite conclusive on point. What is now clear is that, whatever they called, Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, and the rest now Provinces, not States.

Less defensible, as it seems to us, is the decision omit from the translation the rubrics which are prefi in the original to the several articles. The light wh such headings throw upon the text is sometimes c siderable; how considerable it is in the case of article relating to war criminals, the foregoing discuss has shown. The omission of the Latin aphorism fr that passage is very much like striking out the Prince Denmark from the play of ‘Hamlet.'

J. W. GORDO

Art. 9.-BOLSHEVISM AND DEMOCRACY.

1. The State and Revolution. Allen and Unwin, n.d.

1917.

By V. I. Ulianov (N. Lenin). Written August-September

2. The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. By V. I. Ulianov (N. Lenin). The British Socialist Party, n.d. Written November 1918.

3. The History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk. By L. Trotsky. Allen and Unwin, 1919.

4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. By Karl Kautsky. National Labour Press, n.d. Written towards the end of 1918.

5. Terrorisme et Communisme. Paris: Povolozky, 1919.

Par Karl Kautsky.

6. Labour Conditions in Soviet Russia. International Labour Office. Harrison, 1920.

7. Report of the British Labour Delegation to Russia. Trades Union Congress and Labour Party, 1920.

8. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. By Bertrand Russell. Allen and Unwin, 1920.

9. Through Bolshevik Russia. By Mrs Philip Snowden. Cassell, 1920.

10. The Constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic. English translation in Publication No. 136 of the American Association for International Conciliation: New York, 1919. French translation in Buisson, Les Bolcheviki. Paris: Fischbacher, 1919.

And other works.

THE first Revolution achieved by men calling themselves Marxists has been brought about in strange defiance of all the teaching characteristic of Marx. Marx, indeed, was two persons in one: a revolutionary agitator and an evolutionary philosopher. But it was his evolutionary doctrine which marked him off from his Communist predecessors: it was that which, in his eyes and in the eyes of his closest disciples, converted Socialism from a 'Utopian' dream to a 'scientific' theory. And, according to that doctrine, a country could only be transformed into a socialist or communist society-in his vocabulary the two adjectives had the same meaning-after it had passed through a capitalist stage, which had removed Vol. 235.-No. 466.

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from the workers all property in the instruments production, concentrated wealth in the hands of relatively small class, and converted the overwhelming large majority of those engaged both in agriculture a in manufacture into a wage-slave proletariat. He mained so far a revolutionary that he never believed t final transition could be effected by peaceful legislatio force, he declared, is the midwife of every old socie when it is pregnant with a new one. But this ve metaphor makes a long gestation the unescapal prerequisite: force applied too soon can only produ abortion. And Marx's passionate hatred of bourge self-satisfaction on the one side was equalled on the oth by his cold scientific contempt for those who sought 'clear by bold leaps, or remove by legal enactments, t obstacles offered by the successive phases of norm development.'

Russia, when the Bolsheviks seized power, was f from having reached the stage which orthodox Marxis had hitherto postulated as the indispensable prelimina to socialism. In proportion to its extent and populatio it was less industrialised than any other considerab country in Europe. The country was still mainly a agricultural one: the peasants were commonly reckon eighty-five per cent. of the population. In all oth lands the peasants have been the despair of the socialis and though in Russia the joint ownership of the pari or mir was only slowly giving way to individual proper in the soil, there was no reason to suppose that Russia peasants would cling to their land less tenaciously tha peasants elsewhere. In particular districts there wer of course, great large-scale manufactures, both text and metallurgical. But numerically, the Kustarny cottage industries were even yet considerably mo important. They were going through the same evoluti as the domestic industries' of other lands in earli periods; they were being slowly detached

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agriculture, and becoming more or less dependent c capitalist middlemen. But they were still very far fro having reached the stage in which they could readily socialised. A common estimate of the number 'peasants engaged in one or other form of cottag industry' reckoned them at between ten and twel

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millions. The number of factory and mine workers, on the other hand, as given by official statistics, was under three millions, out of a population of some one hundred and thirty. By counting in agricultural labourers, the poorer among the cottage workers, and the intellectual proletariat,' it has been found possible to claim for the proletariat twenty-two per cent. of the nation. This was as early as 1900, but it included the more highly industrialised Poland, now detached from Russia. Such estimates are most insecure; but they are sufficient to show how far Capital was from having fulfilled the evolutionary rôle assigned to it by Marxist theory.

It is essential to realise this in order to understand the very remarkable fact that Bolshevism is opposed as much by the leaders of European socialism as by the organs of capitalism. Non-socialist criticism of Bolshevism, so far as it is intelligent, is based on the wellgrounded belief that the institution of private property furnishes a useful stimulus towards the production of those material commodities on which rests the life of the whole community. It doubts whether, for a long time to come, that stimulus can be replaced by any equally effective force; and it believes that the evils attending capitalism can be vastly lessened without abolishing the existing system in toto. The socialist criticism of Bolshevism, on the other hand, while it assumes, as the Bolsheviks do, that capitalism is the enemy, disbelieves in the feasibility of introducing socialism in a country not yet ripe for it. As M. Martov, the leader of the Russian Mensheviks, has recently said:

'The Bolshevik party has seized the power of the state in a country where the numerical force of the proletariat is very small; a country where the economic and intellectual prerequisites for the organisation of socialist production are absent; and, running up against these objective conditions, they will find in them an insurmountable obstacle to the realisation of their ideals.'

The seizure of political power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 had nothing novel or proletariate about it. It was simply a military coup d'état, like scores of others in times ancient and modern. There is no pretence among the Bolsheviks that it was anything else. Thus M. Trotsky writes:

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