Such is the theory and such the practice of communism. Let us notice how this dictatorship widens out to the control of almost all of life. For there is no halting place, nowhere to draw the line to limit its tendency to ubiquitous control. To begin with, a dictatorship must obviously dominate the entire government. But that is impossible without complete control of finance, of industry and of collective agriculture. All organizations such as trade unions and cooperatives must be brought into harmony with the general scheme. But since many of the older generation, undisciplined and untrained to the new order, prove recalcitrant or unresponsive, the rising generation must by all means be captured and molded. Therefore all of education, all pupils and students and as quickly as possible, all teachers must be brought under the scheme of the dictatorship. They are concerned with what every teacher teaches and with what every pupil is taught. All education thus becomes propaganda.

All youth organizations must train for the new citizenship. But the control of formal education is not enough. All that the people read, all they see, all they are told must, as far as possible, be "truth" according to the dictatorship, state disappear and can one speak of freedom." The State and Revolution. See Liberty Under the Soviets, p. 20.

Bukharin writes: "In extreme cases the workers' government must not hesitate to use the method of the terror. Only when the suppression of the exploiters is complete, when they have ceased to resist, when it is no longer in their power to injure the working class, will the proletarian dictatorship grow progressively milder. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie, little by little, will fuse with the proletariat ; the workers' State will gradually die out; society as a whole will be transformed into a communist society in which there will be no classes." A B C of Communism, by N. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky, p. 81.

Therefore every radio, every moving picture, every newspaper and every line of the press must tell the same story, or permit only criticism by the proletarian class that does not attack the fundamental basis of the dictatorship.

But even this is not enough. Since all depends upon a party, the Party, the only one permitted, that above all must be united, "monolithic." It must present a "solid front" to its world of enemies. Therefore it is unsafe to allow complete democracy even within the one per cent of the population who are Party members. Any deviation to left or right, any continued criticism or independent action, after the supreme organ of authority has made its decision, is counted disloyalty and sedition and must be dealt with even more mercilessly than class enemies. Therefore the left wing sedition, Trotsky and several thousands of his followers, must be banished, exiled, imprisoned, excluded, silenced or crushed. No quarter can be given them in Russia or in any orthodox Communist Party in the world. And members in the deviation on the right, who think that the Party is moving too fast, and that the people are suffering from the strenuous pace, must be silenced or brought to their knees in repentance and humiliating confession.

Outside the Party, the dictatorship must so control that all who are counted class enemies of the regime must be crushed For the most part they must not be allowed to leave the country which counts them "enemies", thus making Russia for them one vast prison house from which there is no escape. They are often denied work, or any means for their maintenance, refused a passport to leave the country, cut off from foreigners, suspected and hounded with spies if they have any intercourse whatever with them. Frequently prohibited from sending a penny of support to needy relatives outside the country, and often not allowed to receive help from them, they are a pitiful spectacle before the world. This applies not only to conservative White Russians but to all radicals and socialists who do not agree with communist orthodoxy as interpreted by the group in control of the central organs of the Party. Thus the dictatorship is extended largely to the control of nearly every individual in certain phases of life in Russia.

And let us notice not only how this dictatorship extends to almost the whole of life, but how the principal of "centralism" ever narrows the monopoly of power to the few. Theoretically, this is a dictatorship of the whole proletariat, all workers, peasants and soldiers or, let us say, nine-tenths of the population. But obviously this vast conglomeration of often uneducated, individualistic and potentially capitalistic peasants are not ready for effective membership in the proletariat. They must first turn to the industrial workers. But many of these also are not disciplined for a socialist society. Therefore the control must be practically limited to the Communist Party. But even this party is liable to a right or left "deviation" that is dangerous. Therefore the control must be centralized in an executive and then in a plenum of the executive. But since there are at least two fractions striving to dominate these bodies, one or the other must be excluded, and the loyal followers of the man or group in power must be placed in positions of authority.

Finally, the inner control narrows down to the nine members of a political bureau and their eight associates, and if any of these are not in harmony with one man and his associates they must be eliminated. Thus, in the end, a dictatorship of the whole working class or nine-tenths of the population, has a tendency to narrow itself to one man and a few loyal associates or followers who fill the interlocking positions of the secretariat, political and organization bureaus.

All of this is the natural and almost inevitable development of a dictatorship of the proletariat, which Lenin, loyally following Marx, defined to mean the "dictatorship of its determined and conscious minority."[1] It becomes in fact a minority, very determined, very conscious, and very small.

We have thus an ever-narrowing dictatorship in "democratic" centralism. What are its undesirable results? There is, first of all, the large liability of error for any minority which holds a dangerous monopoly of power. No man is infallible. A dictatorship must crush other minorities or individuals who oppose. It may at times even find itself in opposition to the majority or the great mass of the people, but ex hypothesis it must "govern or get out." So it governs. Nearly all the reforms and hopes of history have been led at first by an opposing minority. But once action has been taken all such must be nipped In the bud. "It is a commonplace of history that power is poisonous to those who exercise it. ... To sit continuously in the seat of office is inevitably to become separated from the minds and wants of those over whom you govern. ...The special vice of every historic system of government has been its inevitable tendency to identify its own private good with the public welfare. To suggest that communists might do the same is no more than to postulate their humanity."[2]

Another possible result of such a dictatorship is the ever-present danger of tyranny by force. Such a system is usually bad both for rulers and ruled. Napoleon in the early idealism of the revolution presents something of a heroic figure, but in the end he appears a Corsican butcher who has reduced the physical and moral stature of the depleted manhood of France. Dictatorships are dangerous both to the dictator and to the dictated.

Once again, history repeats itself in the indefinite continuity of a dictatorship. It postulates its future millenium in a classless society where man shall not and cannot exploit his fellow man, where the state itself will "wither away" and men will 'do right from force of habit and early training in a favorable environment. But practically, within the limits of human experience, that time never comes. At least it never has come save in the Utopian, incandescent imagination. Actually a dictatorship which was theoretically "temporary," must not only be indefinitely extended but ever- tightened and rendered more complete. It is true that the new environment created by the communist system largely .eliminates the dangerous motivation of personal greed, which is the bane of western nations, but it begets a lust for power and a contempt for liberty and for individual personality that may prove as prolific a root of evil as the love of money.

Take the single instance of the denial of a free press. Concretely, what does this mean? What did it mean and what were its results in Czarist Russia? We may freely grant that this is for a whole class and for a higher end that Czarism, but what are the inevitable results of this method? Once you are determined to monopolize the press and to tell the people what you want them to believe about the virtues of your own government and the vices of every other, you must sustain a continuous system of propaganda that involves constant misrepresentation of foreign peoples and conditions.[3] To illustrate the evils of a controlled and kept press, it will be remembered that, side by side with a free England, Napoleon maintained his dictatorship in France. The news of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar and of Napoleon's defeat was not permitted publication in the French press for twelve years. Compare this with the Soviet Union today.

When the writer was in Russia in 1923 he was completely cut off from all foreign sources of world news. Suddenly on September first occurred the great Japanese earthquake. The author happened to be in the newspaper office of Pravda, or Truth, when the editor came up in great excitement to Professor Paul Monroe of Columbia, in a most sympathetic and appreciative monograph on Russian education, writes: "Constant misrepresentation of foreign peoples and conditions, misrepresentation of current events, and cultivation of enmity to foreign peoples, is, in my judgment, the one great blot on Russian education." Observation on Present Day Russia, Carnegie Series, No. 255, p. 588, tell him the news. There had, he said, been a terrific earthquake. The bed of the ocean had been pushed up and an island had appeared above the surface of the sea. And then the ships of the American navy steamed up and seized possession of this island, true to form, as the natural act of a wicked, imperialist and capitalist country.

It will be remembered that as a matter of fact the American ships were rushing supplies and relief to the victims of the earthquake. But no such friendly cooperation could be admitted. Only communist "truth" i.e., that which aids the revolution, must be told; while the wickedness of capitalist countries must be painted black.[5] Think what it would mean to live under a regime where such a statement could not be contradicted or corrected. As the communist leader well said: "People believe what they are told. And we pro- pose to tell them." So they can if they wish. And the followers of the Prophet in early Arabia, or of a primitive despotism or dictatorship will believe what they are told for a time. For a long time perhaps. But, as Lincoln maintained, you cannot fool all the people all the time, and dictatorships often bring, not their prophesied millenium, but their own nemesis. If truth is more precious than gold; if freedom for the mind is more priceless even than food for the body, who would voluntarily sell his liberties for such a dictatorship? It might be forced upon an uneducated mass unschooled in liberty, but will it ever appeal to the consent of a free people?

The aim of democracy is to produce "the capacity of continuous Initiative" and the development of full personality by a government of, for and by all the people. Let us frankly grant that this ideal is as yet far from attainment on the part of liberalism. But what shall we say of dictatorship? If the outstanding evils of capitalism are its failure to provide equality, freedom and justice for the dispossessed mass, dependent on the few who own, or at least control, the means of production, how does dictatorship get beyond this so long as it denies so many of the essentials of liberty? Equally it begs the question to promise a future millenium when government has "withered away" on this earth, or to promise it in a future world as a compensation for injustice in the present. Even if the communist maintains that dictatorship is a temporary, necessary evil, at least it is an evil, stark and unmitigated, that he offers us. We repeat, it is a poor substitute for a Magna Carta seven centuries after a people have tasted the fruits of liberty.

An ever-tightening dictatorship that is always in danger of becoming, and sometimes does become, tyrannical breeds a continuous series of plots and counter-plots, real or imaginary.

Thus, in fear of the Baldwin cabinet and the die-hards in England in 1927 when relations were severed with Moscow, the Kremlin saw a deep, sinister purpose to overthrow Soviet Russia and Stalin wrote: "We refer not to some indefinite, vague 'danger' of a new war, but to the real and actual threat of a new war in general, and of a war against the Soviet Union in particular." 1 Following this a succession of incidents and situations served to maintain a continual war psychosis.

In August, 1930, a number of men were shot in Russia for hoarding silver change. In September forty-eight specialists of the meat packing industry were executed in connection with the discovery of a reported food plot. In November a plot was reported and indictments were drawn up against eight Russians held for trial in connection with an alleged world-wide conspiracy to start war against Soviet Russia. The public prosecutor, N. U. Krilenko, drew up an indictment in thirty solid newspaper columns against some forty-five persons at the center, 400 in the provinces, 1500 minor Russian adherents and many leading men in foreign countries, such as Sir Henry Deterding of the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company in England. Self-admitted enemies, traitors and confessors, like Professor Ramsin, were reported to have divulged a plot to the effect that after a diplomatic "incident" on the Roumanian border, Roumania was to have declared war, to be followed in quick succession by Poland, France and England. An army of 600,000 men under General Loukomsky was to march on Moscow and another on Leningrad. France was to supply arms and ammunition and the British fleet was to steam into the Baltic and the Black Sea, attacking Leningrad and the Crimea.

It is quite natural that there should be plots, real or imagined, where life is difficult under a high state of tension and where attacks are constantly launched by the group in power first against the left deviation of Trotsky, then against the ablest men on the right, who fear that the pace of the five year plan is too dangerously fast, like Premier Rykof, Tomsky and Bukharin. It is to be expected that under such conditions there is often a factual basis for opposition or conspiracy; but also that there is a natural desire to find or to avail themselves of scapegoats who can be made to bear the brunt of blame for food shortage or hardships, or to keep the people diverted or keyed up on the defensive against some supposed approaching invasion from without or counter-revolution from within. It is all quite natural and quite grim, but it hardly offers ground for believing that such a system is a final cure for humanity's social ills.

2. World Revolution

Here is our second indictment of the system: the dogma that the world can only be saved in one way, by the overthrow of the government in every capitalist country, when the time is ripe, through a destructive revolution of the Russian type, as insisted upon by Marx, Lenin and Stalin, iterated and reiterated unmistakably in all their writings.

Like dictatorship, revolution is to the communist an evil, but he counts it a necessary evil, caused and conditioned by the force which sustains the whole unjust capitalist order. Let us observe just what this doctrine of the inevitableness of revolution implies. It is not merely a bloodless revolution, a swift coup d'etat to enable the most wronged and benevolent class to seize the state and then all live happily ever afterward. Far from it. The whole process is a "continuing revolution." There is a long preparation, leading tip to a transition, and followed by a permanent control, till one class only shall survive, and every individual who differs or opposes shall be obliterated, or, more euphemistically, "liquidated."

The American or French revolutions lasted a short time till each people was free from its oppressor and they had attained their measured objectives. Not so the continuing Russian revolution. That covers all of life and a vast period of time. It operates in at least three phases. First there is the period of preparation when the faithful communist individual and party is urged to be implacable in following out Lenin's twenty-one points adopted by the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, for "the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism." They are "obligated to proclaim a clear break with reformism and with the policy of the center and to propagate this break throughout the ranks of the entire party membership." Where this command is loyally carried out this means a split of hatred and division in every local trade union and every national labor movement in the world. In the labor movement, for instance, of Great Britain, or Germany, or Denmark contempt is poured upon every non-communist labor leader, and loyal communists are bidden to enter each movement in order to form factions for the purpose of weakening the authority of the recognized leaders and their adopted program. For illustration, the labor movement of France was relatively strong and effective for the cause of labor until it was weakened and divided by the communist split.

After the preparation there follows the second phase of the revolution itself. When the time is ripe, the state is to be seized by a determined minority and the whole process of the Russian Revolution repeated, allowing only for the variation of circumstances and details in other countries. The counter-revolution is to be put down by the terror, and the old system destroyed. We are not now pleading the merits or deserts of the capitalist state, but only pointing out the immeasurable risks of unlimited and uncontrollable destruction.

The third phase of the continuing revolution is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with its ever-narrowing centralization of control, its ever-widening sphere of domination over each phase of life, and its ever-tightening grip until its last enemy has been abolished and in the classless society of the future, when no opposition remains, and no one wishes to continue in office or power it can safely "wither away."[5] Such is the naive credulity of its historically baseless future hope. The incorruptible bodies of the miracle-working saints of the Czarist church are easy to believe, as mere child's play of the religious fantasy, compared to the monstrous credulity involved in such a gratuitous promise. Under the alchemy of communism they are to sow dictatorship and reap liberty, to sow hate and reap love, to sow violence and destruction only to reap lasting peace and brotherhood ever afterward.

This policy of world revolution involves complete reliance on force, and the distrust of moral suasion and the principle of consent. It involves contempt for and enmity with all patient, evolutionary, constitutional, educational means and leaders who follow them, as "reformist," compromising and cowardly. Communism puts all its eggs in the one basket of destructive revolution and dictatorship. If it succeeds you have Russia. And if it fails? Imagination quails before the picture. And there can be no guarantee of success. Through war, revolution, famine and pestilence some ten million perished in Russia between 1917 and 1921. The writer recalls the narrative of an eye-witness in the frozen famine region when corpses were eaten. But revolution in the scattered, rural population of Russia would be far less terrible than in a highly industrialized, dense population like that of Germany or England, largely dependent upon others for their food supply.[6]

In playing with revolution men are loosing the forces of the volcano, the earthquake or the forest fire, which no man nor centralized group can control. An individual may direct a bomb but he cannot limit a forest fire once it is lighted. However unorthodox and industrially undeveloped for revolution Russia may have been, perhaps never before in history was there such a favorable combination of a world war, a corrupt government, an indignant people and an able and ruthless leadership, such as met in Petrograd in 1917.

As Laski well observes : "We need not, as communism offers us, the formulae of conflict, but the formulae of cooperation. The sceptical observer is unconvinced that any system ... is entitled from its certainties, to sacrifice all that has been acquired so painfully in the heritage of toleration and freedom, to the chance that its victory may one day compensate for a renunciation that on its own admission, is bound to be grim and long, ... He may suspect whether any regime that is built on hate and fear and violence can give birth to an order rooted in fraternity. For these create an environment of which the children are, equally, hate and fear and violence. The spirit of man ever takes its revenge for degradation inflicted upon it even in the name of good."[7] The appeal to hate or fear or violence brings its own nemesis. A terror terrifies but it also paralyzes. The worst phases of the earlier Cheka have of course passed, but the appeal to fear is still utilized. For illustration, suppose an engineer in Russia makes a mistake. Perhaps through no fault of his own his bridge, or irrigation dam or factory does not succeed. He may be tried for sabotage and imprisoned. Immediately fear takes hold upon others. They hesitate to take responsibility. Spies are everywhere. Russia has always believed in them, rather than in freedom. Unexpectedly, swiftly the lightning strikes, or the blow falls upon the unfortunate. There is an arrest at midnight. No counsel or witness is allowed in the secret trial of the G. P. U. A nameless terror broods and settles down like a cloud. That is why many who would otherwise do so are unable to do their best work under such a system. That is why many a tourist feels a sense of release, as of a burden or a cloud lifted, when he leaves a land that believes in dictatorship, in force and in fear.

Bertrand Russell points out two objections to the communist doctrine of violence: "Once the principle of respecting majorities as expressed at the ballot-box is abandoned, there is no reason to suppose that victory will be secured by the particular minority to which one happens to belong. There are many minorities beside communists : religious minorities, teetotal minorities, militarist minorities, capitalist minorities. . . . They believe that communism is for the good of the majority; they ought to believe that they can persuade the majority on this question, and to have the patience to set about the task of winning by propaganda. . . .

"The second argument of principle against the method of minority violence is that abandonment of law, when it becomes widespread, lets loose the wild beast, and gives a free reign to the primitive lusts and egoisms which civilization in some degree curbs. ...Civilization is not so stable that it cannot be broken up; and a condition of lawless violence is not one out of which any good thing is likely to emerge. ... The Bolshevik philosophy is promoted very largely by despair of more gradual methods. But this despair is a mark of impatience, and is by no means warranted by the facts.[8]

Creativity and construction, at their best, often depend upon the motivation of love. Revolution and destruction, at their worst, await the kindling fire of hate. Biologically and sociologically, love involves creation and sharing, while hatred is primarily destructive. It has murder at its heart. Perhaps it is the murder of wrong and in the face of flagrant and entrenched social evil, it may be closely akin to moral indignation. But if love is blind, hatred moves in darkness. According to the communist slogan : "Revolution is a storm sweeping aside everything that stands in its path" good as well as evil. It may be swift and strong to destroy, but powerless to build again in the midst of Its ashes and embers of ruin. Here is a promised panacea, and it must be judged upon its merits and by its final results. Its mandate is: "Destroy all opposition, hate your enemies, overcome evil with evil, and good will result."

But there is another and opposing principle in life. Its commandment is: "Love even your enemies, overcome evil with good, beget the good that you would seek by creative love, believe in men and in their ultimate response to moral suasion, trust them and appeal to the consent of the governed rather than coerce them by violence ; patience can yet create a classless brotherhood by faith and hope and love."

Communists would tell us that these are baseless dreams, that free men will never love or share or give justice to their dispossessed dependents. If that is so, if those who have power flaunt their unshared wealth in the face of unrelieved poverty and want and unemployment, then red history as written in Russia will repeat itself. Communists will in time apply their principles if we decline to apply ours. If we refuse to give justice they will take by violence; if we refuse to share in love, they will destroy in hate. It may be a race between education and catastrophe, between quickened evolution and destructive revolution, between frankly declared principles applied in a program of action or the fate of Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, Romanoffs and profiteers the world over.

3. Intolerant Persecution.

Communism is a dogma. It seems to hold inevitably an element of bigotry, of intolerance, and of fanaticism implicit in it. It does not seem to spring primarily from the discovery of some great, positive truth which makes its way by its own irresistible appeal and can freely win the consent of majorities. Rather it originated from a counsel of despair, a negative conclusion that truth cannot win its way by moral suasion alone, but that a "determined minority" who have accepted the dogma must seize power by force, must never relinquish it until their last enemy is extinguished, and must impose their dictatorship upon all others. We may grant the benevolent intentions of a Moslem, a fascist or a communist dictatorship and that there are some good results in each. But the question Is What price dictatorship? Is It necessarily at the cost of a harsh intolerance? The dogma of communism is akin, not to the enlightenment of a Gautama, the good news of Christ, or the moral suasion of a Gandhi, but to the sword of Islam, which offers only the alternatives of submission, tribute or death.

This intolerance springs necessarily from the negative philosophy of Marx himself. Marx, for all his giant intellect and indomitable spirit, was unable to grasp the full significance of our complex world. By an over-simplification, all history Is ultimately forced into the arbitrary channels of two classes and their inevitable conflict. The seven-fold rain- bow of reality is reduced to stark black and white, and men are divided into the two simple classes of robbers and robbed, exploiters and exploited. Allowing only for the element of time and development in the process of history, the multi- form possibilities of experimental solutions are impatiently swept away and one panacea is substituted which is to have universal significance, whether finally In Thibet or immediately in Great Britain. They teach that all any country needs ultimately is a proletarian revolution. All history is based on a single materialist foundation; all economics on a simple theory of labor and surplus value, all strategy is reduced to the class war, and all liberty narrowed to a dictatorship. The panacea is simplicity itself. Marx, Lenin and Stalin are all examples of the incarnation of this dogma, and of the price that has to be paid for it.

We do not deny that there is a certain element of the heroic in the old Jewish prophet championing the cause of the disinherited toilers of the world and hurling his invectives against a whole capitalist world of oppressors; nor in Lenin with his back to the wall and his life in his hand facing the hungry mob on the gun carriage in Petrograd, demanding a people's revolution; nor in Stalin and a handful of leaders striving to build a workers' republic with a whole world against them. There is an element of heroism but also of harshness, of strength coupled with intolerance, of courage manifested in fanatical bigotry, in each of the three men and in their resultant system of society.

Marx felt, as had the prophets of his race before him, a deep identification with the economic needs of humanity about him. Here he was a prophet of judgment. But there were whole areas of experience to which he was stranger. Religion, for instance, he could never understand nor appreciate. His life, heroic as it was in many respects, was lived too largely in the abstractions of the library of the British Museum. He was an isolated stranger largely out of touch even with the British working men about him. His view of human nature is abstract and over-simplified, his interpretation of history, after its preliminary stages have been fulfilled according to a simple pattern, is as we have seen, artificially narrowed to a single class conflict and a single panacea, which is to be imposed upon the world by blood and iron. Doubtless a "Christian" Chancellor and Hohenzollern monarch drove him as a hunted exile to the conclusion that state and church were both necessary enemies of the people, and that they must be ruthlessly destroyed before a workers' government could build upon their ashes.

But natural and explicable as his negative conclusion was, Marx was unable to grasp the complex reality of the concrete world, and, in consequence, communism fails to this day to grasp it. A narrow dogmatism is the result. The overtones and softer shades of life are lost in Soviet Russia. A thousand values are swept away with a contemptuous gesture as "bourgeois prejudice. "Just as the leader of the Huns could sack Rome and the stern conqueror of Islam could watch the burning treasures of the library at Alexandria, both unmoved because to their simplified dogma other values were meaningless, so they are today before the hard and narrow materialistic dogma of Marxism.[9]

Moscow hates the word religion like a bad dream and may seek in the end to destroy what seems to them only a reactionary superstition from life. It adopts a materialistic religion of industrialization and makes the machine its god. Any dogmatic religion in its early stages asks no questions and allows none. It preaches a crusade. It tolerates no rivals nor enemies. It may build perhaps a robot world. Time only can tell. That in itself would not be so intolerable if its harsh dogma would permit others to build their individual or social life according to their own patterns and values. But there are no other values save their own that such a dictatorship of a single dogma can see or admit. And this means tragedy for all who differ, who are conceived as enemies, imprisoned within the iron bars of a dictatorship which permits no escape. And it is tragedy for a divided world, separated not only geographically between two conflicting social orders, but often between members of the same family, who speak two different languages and live in two worlds, the poles apart, divided between those who do and those who do not submit to the Islam of the Marxian dogma.

The harsh dogmatism of communism shows itself in their intolerant propaganda against all whom they regard as their class enemies, whether within or without Russia. Breaking up meetings seems to be a favorite indoor sport. Boring from within and wrecking if they cannot capture trade unions seems to be an established policy. The creation of class hatred is a major endeavor. They seem particularity bitter against liberals, radicals or socialists who differ from them, such as Ramsay MacDonald or Norman Thomas.

As typical of their line of attack we give a single illustration. In the recent troubles in our Southern textile mills the American Civil Liberties Union generously furnished bail of $30,000 for a group of persecuted communist workers. These men "jumped" their bail and left for Moscow, where they remained with the approval of the Party. This act came close to closing the door for bail in future cases of a similar sort. Judges now have an excuse for fixing very high bail, and even sympathetic friends will be afraid to risk the amount involved. Hence the Civil Liberties Union felt obliged to refrain from trying to raise bail in similar cases in the future. Without the slightest evidence of gratitude or acknowledgment of help given, the following communist press release thus bitterly assails these who had sought to defend them, attacking them with seemingly malicious falsehood, for not one of the five sentences of the indictment is true: "Norman Thomas, the social fascist candidate of the Socialist Party, who was present in the chambers when the massacre took place, (reference is to police brutality to the leader of a Communist Delegation to the Board of Estimate) smiled charmingly in true ministerial fashion.[10] Only last week Thomas led the attack within the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union against imprisoned and tortured workers by refusing them bail and attacking the International Labor Defense in its defense of militant jailed workers in the present economic crisis. The answer to the cry for bread is billies. On this, the Republican, Socialist, and Democratic Parties are one. The Rev. Norman Thomas and Mayor Walker are the direct representatives of capitalist America against the bitter struggle for work or wages."[11]

Such propaganda may appeal to ignorant workers unacquainted with the facts in a country where the whole press is completely controlled as in Russia, but it will never commend itself or appeal to the intelligence of free men in a country where the press is not gagged. It is to be hoped that the day will come when the communists themselves will see that such propaganda is shortsighted and self-defeating. It is as filthy as it is false. But, unfortunately, it is all too typical of the communist press today in Russia, in the United States and in other lands. It illustrates the harsh dogmatism of communism.

The intolerant dogmatism of the communist position manifests itself in almost every area and relationship of life. It has a different conception of the value of human life, of the worth of personality or the rights of the individual. While the writer was in Moscow recently a number of men were shot for hoarding silver change, to the value of twenty-five dollars or more. It is true that this had become a menace to their currency system and to social welfare. In speaking of this to a communist professor he replied in substance: "Did we shoot them? Of course, why not? There were four mentioned today you say? I am only surprised that there were so few. Would you think that the report of four killed in a battle in your World War would be surprising? You do not realize that we are now at war. We shall kill all that we must to win this war." This man was a professor, a man of learning. On his shelves were many religious books as he was an expert on the history of religions.

He was inflexibly honest, self-sacrificing, loyal to humanity in the mass, if they belonged to the proletarian class. Yet he thought no more of shooting four men or forty-eight men later in the "food plot/' than he would of killing that many cockroaches on his floor. Of course he would not like to do either, for he is a gentleman and a scholar, and killing cockroaches or men would be unaesthetic and unpleasant, at best a regrettable necessity.[12] Unfortunately, we cannot appeal to a visitor from Mars to judge between these two views of life. But to members of the western world of liberalism, the manifold results of such an intolerant dogmatism are appalling. They are devastating alike to living a free, or complex, or abundant life with any deviation from orthodoxy within the confines of the dictatorship, save on its prescribed terms, or to understanding or cooperation with the world outside.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sphere of religion. To this dogmatism, religion is superstition, religion is opium, religion is poison. Marx and Lenin both declared it to be so. Therefore the case is closed. We are told repeatedly by educated men in Russia that "every true scientist is an atheist." If there is any question about it, a quotation from Marx or Lenin will settle it. It is vain to say we believe in science and evolution as much as they, that so many of the great scientists from Kepler and Newton to our own day were believers. It is useless to point out that Darwin, according to his own autobiography, was a reverent agnostic. All that is meaningless and valueless. Under such an artificially simplified dogma the individual is black or white, theist or atheist, capitalist or communist, comrade or enemy. Within the dictatorship it must be submission or spiritual death.

The communist does not see that though he repudiates the word religion, he has himself set up a new fanatical religion of atheistic humanism. Professor Ross speaks of "the terrible single-mindedness of the fanatic." It makes a difference whether this" is an academic phrase written at safe distance, or a solid fact within the confines of the terror. There is a certain undeniable gain in simplicity, in the strength of dogmatism, in the enthusiasm of an unthinking crusade. But there is also appalling loss. The flaming theism of Islam and atheism of communism present a strange parallel. Either may conquer us with force, but they will not win our consent until they can appeal to reason. And it is difficult to see how either can do that without such radical alteration that they would lose not only their force, but their distinctive identity.

It is to be regretted that our very difference of vocabulary leads to conflict and misunderstanding. The communist loathes "religion." But what is religion? Suppose that, reduced to its simplest terms it were conceived as the effort to bring the whole life into the light of the best that we know, and then to live our life in loyalty to that best Suppose that, with Reinhold Niebuhr, we think of religion at a minimum as faith In something that reason cannot justify, and at the maximum as the belief that the universe backs that faith. Although of course such terminology would satisfy neither the fundamentalist theist nor atheist, yet upon any such broad definition, Southern Buddhism, though atheistic, is a religion, and communism is likewise a fanatical, materialist, atheistic religion. Large numbers of independent observers have been impressed with this fact.

But let us pass from definition to life. Whenever man has been left free as he passes from the primitive to the higher reaches of civilization, he always responds to his environment in at least three ways in science, in art, in religion. In science he seeks to master and control his environment and improve his life ; in art to beautify, to harmonize and enrich it; in religion to integrate, to unify, to relate his life to its spiritual source within and to its ends without. From Plato, from Hegel, the teacher of Marx, to Woodrow Wilson, men have pointed out the values in religion, both individual and social, as a great architectonic force in life. Multitudes of men have experienced these values and would die for them. All would admit the caricatures, the perversions, the miscarriages that history records in religion as well as in science, in art, in politics and every other field of life. But what is the remedy? Communism says there is only one. Destroy and rebuild according to the dogma and the dictatorship of a proletarian state.

It is one thing for Marx to propose this on paper. It is quite another to embody this in flesh and blood. When the writer was telling the Russian emigres in Paris of the possibilities of a great world's laboratory of social experiment, one of them replied in substance: "A laboratory is a fine thing in theory. But suppose your own family and your own relatives are in the crucible. Suppose that fifty of your relatives and friends were shot by the Cheka or perished in the revolution, the terror and the civil war that followed. Suppose that many of your friends were now in poverty, not allowed to leave the country, hounded with spies, some of them in exile for their religion, do you think you would be so enthusiastic about this laboratory?"

And here is our final indictment of the system. As we have seen, they tolerate religion to the extent of still permitting worship in the majority of the churches. But many are in exile, some are persecuted for their religion, and the leaders frankly state that they intend to do all in their power finally "to liquidate this superstition" to extirpate this poisonous growth from the human heart. And here, in sympathy at least, we are all in their crucible. Our civil liberties, our religious freedom, our tolerance, our liberalism, our whole complex of priceless values, which the coarse thumb and finger of a materialistic dogmatism fail to feel nearly all we most value in life is at stake.

Communists will claim that they are not persecuting religion, as did the high official previously referred to. But we would reply as we did to him that they certainly are doing so. The writer could name whole sectarian denominations that have suffered severely and are still suffering from persecution.

The writer will confine himself to a single illustration. There is a certain body in Russia held in high regard throughout the world, though they are now isolated and, without foreign connections, who neither ask nor receive help from abroad. A number of them had their own communal farms, happily and successfully, long before the October Revolution. But although economically collectivized, their land was taken from them and given to others. Cut off from their natural means of livelihood and the free expression of their religious views, they asked to be allowed to leave the country. They authorized the writer to ask the proper authority if they might be permitted to emigrate to Canada, there to establish their own collective or communal farms, going out empty handed save for their few personal effects, and taking not a cent of money with them. This was absolutely refused. It will be remembered how the Germans in 1929, once prosperous, but with most of their property expropriated and persecuted for their religion, left in desperation, after President Hindenburg and others had generously subscribed to relieve their distress. The indignant Swedes left likewise. But others are no longer allowed to leave. Not only have they been refused permission to leave but some of them today are on the terrible Solovyetzky Island. They desire no publicity. No people on earth are more ready bravely and silently to suffer. In other lands, a place where one is forcibly detained is called a prison. Russia is just that for a multitude today, however much they are in the minority. We repeat that the whole system for the long-oppressed proletarian majority has economically meant release, creative expression, substantial betterment. But for some millions of the minority, it is a prison house from which there is no escape. (Such a thing, after the revelations of George Kennan and others concerning the Siberian exiles of the Czar, we called damnable. And, calling a spade a spade, such a thing we call damnable today.

That which is a terror to such a large minority in Russia today is odious to the whole world.

This then is our threefold indictment of the Soviet system: a dictatorship that extends to almost all of life, and that takes the form sometimes of tyranny and sometimes of terror; the policy of world revolution by violence as the only panacea of social deliverance; and the intolerance, bigotry and persecution which spring from the Marxian dogma of communism.

Notes

1. Russian Soviet Republic, p. 324.

2. Karl Marx, p. 42, by H. J. Laski.

3. Joffe writes: "To deceive your class enemies, to violate, to destroy a treaty imposed by force, but never to sin against the revolutionary proletariat, never to violate the obligation taken on yourself before the revolution those are the true revolutionary methods of the true revolutionary struggle.

4. Izvestia, Jan. 1, 1919.

5. Isevestia, July 28, 1927.

6. Bukharin writes: "Many persons have supposed that the ferocious character of our civil war is due to the backwardness of our country, or to some peculiar 'Asiatic 1 traits. The opponents of revolution in western Europe are in the habit of saying that 'Asiatic socialism* flourishes in Russia, and that in 'civilised' lands a revolutionary change will be effected without atrocities. Obviously this is all nonsense. Where capitalist development is far advanced, the resistance of the bourgeoisie will be more stubborn. The intelligentsia (the professional classes, the technicians, the managing engineers, the army officers, etc.) are more strongly solidarised with capital, and are for that reason far more hostile to communism. IE such countries, therefore, the civil war will inevitably assume a more savage form than in Russia. The course of the German revolution has actually proved that the war assumes harsher forms in countries where capitalist development is farther advanced." A B C of Communism, pp, 133-133.

7. H. J. Laski, Communism, p. 244.

8. Bolshevism m Theory and Practice, pp. 146-449.

9. As John Dewey says: "Marx had no conception, moreover, of the capacity of expanding Industry to develop new inventions so as to develop new wants, new forms of wealth, new occupations ; nor did he imagine that the intellectual ability of the employing class would be equal to seeing the need for sustaining consuming power by high wages in order to keep tip production and its profits." Individualism Old and New, p. 103.

10. Sam Nessin, leader of the communist delegation, continued a protest to the point of breaking up the meeting. He was ordered out of the room by the Mayor who, however, indulged in cheap talk about fighting him if he (the Mayor) were not presiding at the meeting. This probably encouraged the police, who needed no encouragement, to beat up Nessin very badly, not in the Hall of the Board of Estimate, but downstairs. Norman Thomas was present at the meeting, he did not smile, and as soon as he knew of the beating, which was only after it occurred, he protested most vigorously.

11. Quoted in The World Tomorrow, November, 1930.

12. The writer believes he is not doing this man an injustice for he is sending 1 this manuscript, including this section of it, for his correction and criticism.