THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Malbone W. Graham 
 
 m
 
 THE PASSING OF THE OLD 
 ORDER IN EUROPE
 
 The Passing of the Old 
 Order In Europe 
 
 BY 
 
 GREGORY ZILBOORG 
 
 Secretary to the Ministry of Labor under the Kerensky 
 Government in Russia 
 
 New York 
 
 THOMAS SELTZER 
 
 1920
 
 Copyright, 1920, 
 By Thomas Seltzer, Inc. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 All Rights Reserved
 
 ITS 
 
 
 To 
 
 ROMAIN ROLLAND, 
 
 Friedrich Foerster, 
 
 Maxim Gorky, 
 
 and all those- -who in the darkness of hatred 
 
 held fast their lights of love. 
 
 1521109
 
 Les idies se use dans une democratie, d'autant plus vite 
 qu'elles se sont plus promptement propagees. Comhiens de 
 republicains en France s'etaient, en mains de cinquante ans, 
 degoutis de la republique, du suffrage universel et de tant de 
 libertes conquises avec ivresse! Apres le culte fetichiste du 
 nombre, avec Voptimisme heat qui avail cru aux saintes 
 majorites et qui attendait le progrh humain, I'esprit de vio- 
 lence soufflait I'incapacite des majorites a se gouverner elles- 
 memes, leur veualite, leur veulerie, leur basse et peureuse 
 aversion de toute superiorite, leur lachete oppressive, soule- 
 
 vaient la revolte. . . . 
 
 Romain Rolland.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER ^^^^ 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 I The Impasse of Politics 13 
 
 II The Debauch of European Thought ... 35 
 
 III The Morass of War 66 
 
 IV The Recovery of Revolution 91 
 
 V Revolutionary Contradictions 125 
 
 VI Additional Contemplations 144 
 
 VII Light and Shadows I73 
 
 VIII Light and Shadows— Continued .... 198 
 
 IX Consequences and Possibilities 220
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 At the moment I begin this book I see be- 
 fore my eyes two pictures. 
 
 I see myself on a foggy afternoon, some 
 time in 1915, coming home from the hospital 
 where I worked, and thinking — as I was al- 
 ways thinking, — of the wounded men who 
 were being sent by thousands and thousands 
 to the city (Kief) every day from the 
 front. To me the war seemed a strange 
 puzzle, impossible to comprehend. I could not 
 understand the fighters, I could not under- 
 stand ourselves who patched them up and 
 sent them back to fight. We were all helping 
 to add to the perplexity of this strange situa- 
 tion. We, Russians, were fighting to defend 
 our country, to help the Tsar's government to 
 win a victory; and it was quite probable that 
 we should later hear the Tsar say: 
 
 "You had been protesting! You had been 
 fighting against us before the war! You see 
 now how splendid a victory we have won. 
 Could a bad government win like this?'* 
 
 3
 
 4 Introduction 
 
 On the other hand, not to fight meant to 
 give up many of our beloved ideals and hopes 
 for Russia's ultimate future — to turn her over 
 to another autocracy of the same kind, but one 
 speaking a different language. And yet the 
 enthusiasm of our soldiers seemed a psychologi- 
 cal abnormality which we could not under- 
 stand. 
 
 With these same thoughts ever persistent I 
 went back to my home this foggy afternoon, 
 and found there a tall soldier, a real giant of 
 the Semenoff Imperial Guard regiment. He 
 had come up to say farewell to his sister, a maid 
 in the household, before returning to the front. 
 He had been slightly wounded, but, after a 
 quick recovery, was going back. He was in 
 the midst of a story of the battlefield. 
 
 "You do not see anything, even in day- 
 light," he was exclaiming. "One would say 
 you had lost your eyes. You do not even see 
 him. You are just going on, with rifle and 
 bayonet — the firing sometimes is so strong and 
 the confusion so terrible that many of our own 
 people attack each other as enemies. All are 
 screaming!'* 
 
 The tall soldier as he talked looked like a 
 savage animal. His eyes gleamed like globes
 
 Introduction 5 
 
 of glass, with cruel lights in them. His hands 
 clenched into fists. His body inclined tensely 
 forward. Seeing him one would say: "He is 
 fighting. He is killing at this moment." He 
 continued : 
 
 "Suddenly there is silence" — the cruel fire 
 died out of his eyes, his fists unclenched, his 
 body relaxed — "You turn around and you see 
 — one of our men with a hand gone, — another, 
 an Austrian, with his nose shot away; over 
 there lies a long-bearded Jew with a torn 
 
 face " The man stopped and began to 
 
 cry, like a little ailing child, with great sobs. 
 This giant became suddenly a weak, small, un- 
 happy human child, with an aching human 
 heart. 
 
 "They do not hate the enemy," I said to my- 
 self. "They do not fight for any reason ex- 
 cept that they were sent to fight. That is the 
 psychological mystery of our time, the cruel 
 enigma of our modern civilization. And we 
 thought there was enthusiasm, that our people 
 forgot at the moment of mobilization all their 
 sufferings and whatever aspirations they had. 
 We find we were mistaken. Among all the 
 thousands of wounded, sometimes mad, soldiers 
 I met, I could find none who seemed to grasp
 
 6 Introduction 
 
 the true significance of the war. Because of 
 their diseased condition no test could be relied 
 upon. Here was a strong, healthy giant, a 
 man with a human brain, a human heart. The 
 heart ached. The brain either slept or was 
 hypnotized by those who did know what they 
 were fighting for, but who did know how to 
 transform a human being into cannon food." 
 
 Perhaps later on humanity may be able to 
 analyze causes and effects impartially and to 
 understand clearly the comparative values of 
 a soldier's fists and a soldier's tears. That mo- 
 ment was a revelation to me. I felt for the 
 first time since the war began that we were on 
 the verge of a great moral collapse, the weight 
 and reach of which we were utterly incompe- 
 tent to estimate. 
 
 The second picture is this. 
 
 It is evening of the first day of the 
 Russian revolution. At the moment no one 
 is sure that the revolution is real, that it 
 will mean victory. A doubt envelops us. 
 We had always been taught and had al- 
 ways believed that in the minds of the masses 
 of the people the Tsar stood for a symbol 
 of holy power — the representative of God 
 on earth. We feared the critical moment which
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 would follow his overthrow — feared it in so far 
 as, in the midst of our fighting, we were. per- 
 mitted to remember or fear anything. It was 
 during this evening that, in passing a corridor 
 in the palace of the Taurida, I was halted by 
 a soldier of the Imperial Guard, a man who 
 had joined the revolutionists. "Comrade," he 
 said, "when will Kolya be brought?" I did not 
 understand and asked him to repeat his ques- 
 tion. "Kolya," he said again, "when will he 
 be brought — Nicholas?" He laughed. Kolya 
 is the diminutive of Nicholas and I got his 
 meaning. "Very soon, be sure of it," I an- 
 swered, and held out my hand. He shifted his 
 rifle to his left hand and clasped my right 
 firmly, in friendly fashion. 
 
 Also, the story about the Tsar was a mistake. 
 While we intellectual revolutionists were fight- 
 ing, and fearing while we fought relative to 
 what might afterwards evolve from the brain 
 of the Russian muzhik in his military uni- 
 form, that brain was already busy working out 
 its own quiet, sober, practical theories of the 
 revolution. We were mistaken. We needed 
 an enormous historical object lesson to prove to 
 us that we were mistaken. 
 
 And now, while trying to put on paper the
 
 8 Introduction 
 
 story of my experiences of the last four or five 
 years; while trying to analyze as best I can 
 the struggles and troubles of which I was a 
 witness, I cannot but remember well these two 
 soldiers who hnow — indeed, who know more 
 perhaps than the best trained observers and 
 analyzers. Therefore I see that my task is 
 something more than that of writing a book of 
 a purely academic character, not because the 
 time is not yet ripe for the writing of such a 
 book. On the contrary, if an undertaking of 
 that kind were possible, 'twould be most ad- 
 visable and valuable in results. The task I 
 have set before myself is prompted by my con- 
 viction that in the course of the struggles of 
 the present-day world, humanity has developed 
 a very serious disease. In the pages of this 
 book I shall try to describe and define this dis- 
 ease in abundant detail. For the present I can 
 only give a name to it. The disease is mob 
 psychosis. The contagion was carried by the 
 war, by revolution, by political lying, by diplo- 
 matic betrayal, social disturbances and moral 
 suppression. These are the instruments which 
 have almost killed the individual lives, the very 
 personalities, of human beings. 
 
 In 1915 we had received anguished word of
 
 Introduction 9 
 
 warning from Remain Rolland, who declared 
 that our epoch was an epoch of mediocrity, of 
 commonplace, little average souls ; little hearts, 
 which, by a curious historical coincidence, will 
 produce a great noise and bring on great bloody 
 events. 
 
 Great bloody events! Some years before, 
 while writing the last pages of his " Jean-Chris- 
 tophe," Romain Rolland foresaw them ahnost 
 on the very eve of the war. Mediocrity then 
 was also his conclusion. From the psychologi- 
 cal point of view, mediocrity, spread to this ex- 
 tent throughout the world, means the contagion 
 of clamorous, hazy, half-ideas, half-words. It 
 means that minds are submerged and have lost 
 temporarily their governing forces, their proc- 
 ess of criticism and independent reasoning. 
 
 Therefore, again, it is impossible now to ana- 
 lyze or to explain scientifically the most serious 
 events of our lives as long as this disease con- 
 tinues. It does not depend upon history. It 
 does not even depend upon political struggle. 
 It depends purely upon our psychological re- 
 action to the disease itself. 
 
 Only one kind of book is possible now, how- 
 ever. I should call it a half h^ical kind. It 
 must be a simple narrative, poignant and inti-
 
 10 Introduction 
 
 mate ; a revelation of the doubts, thoughts, seek- 
 ings, and aspirations of one who has had an 
 opportunity to be somewhat near to the events 
 of our days. It is indeed one's duty to sur- 
 render one's experiences. A written word, a 
 conscious written word, is a result of criticism 
 and self-analysis : and as such is the most val- 
 uable instrimient at the present time. I should 
 like, furthermore, to give my book a sub-title — 
 "A book without quotations" — ^because I desire 
 to avoid authoritative quotations, authoritative 
 statements. In a period of mob psychosis it is 
 pernicious to use authorities. Authorities jus- 
 tified the inquisition of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury. They would justify the inquisition 
 of the twentieth century. Each side can find 
 in books and essays the phrases, statements, 
 and aphorisms to justify its own crimes. 
 Lloyd George and Bethmann-Hollweg, Clem- 
 enceau and William the Second, Nicholas the 
 Second and Balfour, Wilson and Lenin, all 
 quoted, and all were sure they were right,-^ 
 or made believe they were sure. 
 
 This is a book of simple contemplations, a 
 rendering of sometimes indefinite thoughts 
 which obtruded themselves many times during 
 the experiences of the past few years. To re-
 
 Introduction 11 
 
 late them, to give some illustrations of the 
 workings of human brains and hearts — this is 
 my aim rather than the exploitation of prin- 
 ciples or procedures. 
 
 I have not given in this book an adequate 
 place to Russia, where I spent all my life and 
 where I gathered all my political, social, and 
 scientific experiences. In fact, I made a point 
 of not doing so, notwithstanding that Russia 
 is now the center of general attention, a germi- 
 nating field of social and political experiment. 
 I have not done this because I think, and I try 
 to make it clear that Russia is only a link in the 
 chain of all present-day events. In her recent 
 past, in her present, and in her future she is 
 closely woven into the general life of the globe. 
 Intellectually, poHtically, socially, she lives 
 with all the rest of the world, despite block- 
 ades ; and the rest of the world lives with her — 
 despite passport systems and their restrictions. 
 
 New York, March, 1920.
 
 THE PASSING OF THE OLD 
 ORDER IN EUROPE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE IMPASSE OF POLITICS 
 
 If we examine closely the different political 
 schools and philosophic theories of the last 
 twenty-five or thirty years, we shall find no 
 basis for them in the accepted principles of 
 ancient philosophies. The writers who hark 
 back to the theories of Plato and Aristotle and 
 try to apply them to modern conditions are, of 
 course, always with us, and it is perhaps san- 
 guine to hope that their habits of investigation 
 will ever be as obsolete as their outlooks. But, 
 on the whole, the political and social theories 
 evolved in the last few decades have been sim- 
 ply the ideologic expression of the spontaneous 
 process of social development which began in 
 the time of Xapoleon. 
 
 Now, a political theory may be either an in- 
 terpretation of an actual past or the projec- 
 tion of a possible future: in the first case the 
 emphasis is upon precedent and the tendency 
 
 13
 
 14 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 is that of "Realpolitik ;" in the second case the 
 emphasis falls upon innovation, and the vision 
 is accordingly "Utopian." Treitschke and 
 Hobbes are representative of the "real" school. 
 They merely sought to embody, in a permanent 
 crystallized form, principles which have always 
 operated in all sorts of political societies. They 
 sought the common denominator which made 
 some sort of political society expedient in both 
 Prussia and Polynesia. Neither the element of 
 ethics nor that of creative endeavor had an im- 
 portant place in their systems. Force was the 
 basic concept of their philosophies, and their 
 habit of magnifying the role of power in the 
 body politic had the astute effect of justifying 
 "the powers that be." Hobbes and Treitschke 
 may have admitted ethical principles and cur- 
 rent moral saws in their schemes, but the in- 
 clusion of these elements by such reactionary 
 theorists was an example of vice's homage to 
 virtue, and proved the necessity for erecting 
 political philosophy on a more comprehensive 
 moral basis than "Realpohtik" could supply. 
 So much for the morals of realism. The 
 other kind of theoretical approach, which I de- 
 liberately call Utopian, suffers from the same 
 defect in a slightly different position. The
 
 The Impasse of Politics 15 
 
 Utopians, men like Marx and Bakunin, began 
 with a hot moral revulsion against the ugliness 
 and disorder of contemporary society. Nega- 
 tively, their moral impulses were sound. They 
 needed only intellectually to be deepened and 
 enriched in order to provide the basis for a 
 new system of society. Unfortunately the 
 moral basis of Marxism was obscured by its 
 economic development, and the new society the 
 Marxians looked forward to rested upon the 
 same old methods — the methods of force and 
 constraint. Whether these methods are called 
 "historical necessity" or the supreme law of 
 human society matters little. Their substance 
 remains the same. Marx and Treitschke were 
 both "post-Napoleon," and by that fact their 
 thoughts are dated and their underlying kin- 
 ship established. 
 
 A general survey of the history of the sec- 
 ond half of the nineteenth century would jus- 
 tify the conclusion that the revolutionary 
 traditions of 1789-93, of 1830-48 have been 
 forgotten. It would be far from the truth to 
 say that these traditions inspired the European 
 life of the last sixty or seventy years. What 
 this period inherited was not the traditions of 
 revolution, but the traditions of Napoleonism.
 
 16 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 it seemed for a while as if the American and 
 French revolutions would bring about a change 
 not only in the social life, but in the mental at- 
 titude of future generations. It seemed that 
 the absolutism of the Bourbons, and of the 
 United Kingdom in its treatment of the colo- 
 nies, had been crushed, not merely as a political 
 form but even as a state of mind. This change 
 could be expected because of the coming into 
 being of The Third Estate as a political factor. 
 But the expected did not come. What did hap- 
 pen was that the conceptions of centralization 
 fostered by Louis XIV, Frederick of Prussia, 
 or even Voltaire and the rest of the Encyclo- 
 pedists, proved more vital than the idealistic 
 conceptions of the Declaration of Rights. It 
 was not the ideas of the French Revolution as 
 conceived by Robespierre, Saint Simon, or 
 Fourier, but the ideas of Napoleon and Bis- 
 marck that gained acceptance. 
 
 Further on, in our chapter on War, we shall 
 deal in greater detail with the causes of this. 
 It is sufficient to state now that the wonderful 
 centralized state machine of Napoleon was the 
 result of a military conception. 
 
 It was not an accident that Napoleon was a
 
 The Impasse of Politics 17 
 
 general. Paraphrasing the famous saying of 
 Voltaire, one might say that had there been no 
 Napoleon, he would have had to be invented. 
 And Bismarck was his legitimate and natural 
 heir. Bismarck is the embodiment of the theory 
 of centralization; he stands as the symbol of 
 the second half of the nineteenth century domi- 
 nated by the idea of centralization: — that the 
 State is the only supreme power. The State 
 is valuable only so long as it represents a 
 machine, with a supreme and powerful grip, 
 ruling and governing minute, separate and 
 fragmentary wills. 
 
 Hence the methods for national administra- 
 tion, openly recognized or not, must be the 
 same; and although the last six or seven 
 decades of the nineteenth century have been 
 called the period of parliamentarianism, that 
 period differs very little in essence from the 
 frank and open state-despotism of the six- 
 teenth century as outlined by Machiavelli. 
 What characterized the political parliament 
 was not that it was representative of the peo- 
 ple and therefore an expression of the will of 
 the people. It was merely a different method 
 of rule by a centralized state. 
 
 This accounts for the degeneration of par-
 
 18 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 liamentarianism and for the disrepute with 
 which it has fallen in the minds of enlightened 
 men and women. It is not only radical Russia 
 that dared to violate the supreme holy power 
 of the Constituent Assembly freely elected by 
 the people. Even in England, where parlia- 
 mentarianism is six centuries old, the people 
 have, to a large extent, ceased to respect it, so 
 that J. Ramsay Macdonald, an unconditional 
 adherent of parliamentary democracy, could 
 state in an article in the "Nation," July, 1919, 
 that British labor is more and more dissatisfied 
 with the idea of par liamentarianism. The Ger- 
 man Constituent Assembly was so weak that 
 it had to remove from Berlin to Weimar to be 
 allowed to deliberate in peace. Even so, it was 
 threatened actually by various political groups. 
 More significant still, it had practically to sub- 
 mit to the will of those entirely outside it and 
 to sign the peace treaty, although the majority 
 of the assembly was against signing. 
 
 Another example is the Peace Conference 
 at Paris. Never in all history was a conference 
 so big, never had a conference to deal with mat- 
 ters of such importance. Yet for all that it 
 had no authority. The Bolsheviki, or radicals, 
 do not recognize it at all, ex ojjicio, and even
 
 The Impasse of Politics 19 
 
 the Allies are working against the most vital 
 decisions of it. The Italians protested; China 
 still withholds her signature to the treaty ; Rou- 
 mania in the Near East is acting in defiance of 
 its decisions; England and France in their 
 competition for supremacy in Eastern Europe 
 seem to have forgotten that there ever was such 
 a thing as the Treaty of Versailles. 
 
 There is no authority. "Wliy? Because or- 
 ganization, elections, majorities, have degen- 
 erated into mere form. Thej'' have no moral 
 force with the people because the people come 
 to know that they are mere forms and have 
 ceased to believe in them. 
 
 This is the real meaning of the historical 
 events of the last decades. "What was the real 
 difference between the governments of despotic 
 Turkey and autocratic Russia, and the govern- 
 ments of constitutional England and republi- 
 can France? Basically, none. In all these 
 countries the principle that prevailed was the 
 supremacy of the State. In Constantinople 
 and Petrograd the State was represented by 
 a person; in London and Paris it was repre- 
 sented by a group or organization. But in 
 both these forms of representation the main 
 idea was the bringing about of immediate aims,
 
 20 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the securing of a political hand-to-mouth ex- 
 istence. There was neither a social system, nor 
 a guiding principle, nor a creative political 
 spirit. The forms already existing were con- 
 sidered more or less perfect forms, and all vital 
 emergencies were bent merely upon their pres- 
 ervation and continuance. 
 
 The chief characteristic of the political life 
 of Europe, from the Far East to the Far West, 
 was egoistic self-satisfaction with existing in- 
 stitutions and the social order. Any new idea 
 that appeared was to be suppressed — because 
 it was new. It is not too much to say that 
 political life in recent years has not advanced 
 very far beyond the authoritarianism of 
 medieeval times, when it was thought that there 
 was nothing new under the sun and that so- 
 ciety's sole duty was to understand the meaning 
 of what was and to conserve what is. 
 
 It may appear strange that I can see no ma- 
 terial difference between the various democra- 
 cies in Europe. Let us look more into the mat- 
 ter. One idea and one only stood out as a 
 possible means of salvation amid all the strug- 
 gles of the second half of the nineteenth 
 century, — the idea of the majority. As a prin- 
 ciple there can be no objection to it. But how
 
 The Impasse of Politics 21 
 
 was it carried out in actual practice? The 
 Tsar was sure — or pretended to be sure — that 
 he represented the majority of the Russian 
 people; that all protesting revolutionists were 
 pernicious Nihilists who must be removed from 
 society. In England, real universal suffrage 
 does not as yet exist, and the majority, repre- 
 sented there, is not a real majorit3^ It was 
 moulded according to a certain pattern by a 
 new force invented by our civilization to defeat 
 the real will of the majority. Call this force 
 whatever you will — public opinion, the press. 
 It accomplished the purpose for which it was 
 called into play with marvelous efficiency, so 
 that the vote of the majority meant nothing. 
 It was not the expression of the will of the 
 people. Those who could carry on the most 
 powerful propaganda had their way. And the 
 State, for all the free speech and free press it 
 granted, having at its disposal the most effec- 
 tive weapon of propaganda, the powerful and 
 influential press, had things its own way. 
 While officially representing the people, the 
 State in reality represented only the people 
 who supported it. And these were a minority! 
 Republican France offers a still more strik- 
 ing example. Every time a new election was
 
 22 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 to be held a new "crime"- of Gustav Herve was 
 discovered, and he was put in jail and held 
 there until after the election. Thus a country 
 which lacks the syndicated Northcliffe press 
 uses other centralized forces of governmental 
 supremacy. The law, the legal codes, and all 
 the governmental traditions were the servants 
 and tools always at the command of the State. 
 
 Thus the idea of government by majorities 
 was mutilated and inevitably proved a failure. 
 It did not bring salvation. Our rulers suc- 
 ceeded in imposing upon us what is tanta- 
 mount to a despotic government just as 
 surely and effectively as Napoleon did at the 
 beginning of the last century. And to-day we 
 are witnessing the death of majority rule or at 
 least of the idea for which it stands. It has 
 committed suicide. 
 
 Why has this happened? Can it be that the 
 anarchists are right after all in their persistent 
 denial of all governments? Hardly. I think 
 it is rather because we were hypnotized by the 
 idea of a mechanical state, and became utterly 
 oblivious of those elements of the state' which 
 gave it its vitalitj^ — the individual, and the 
 moral basis underlying it. The very concept 
 of the individual was ehminated from the mod-
 
 The Impasse of Politics 23 
 
 ern parliamentary, or non-parliamentary, or 
 democratic state. On the one hand, our indus- 
 trial development, economic growth, and the 
 sophistication of the human spirit and mind, 
 gave birth to strong individuals, with initiative, 
 and nerve, and a desire to do things. On the 
 other hand, the same causes produced a strong 
 centralized state which brooded no interference 
 from the individual. It took no account of the 
 individual's growth. If he stood in its way it 
 either destroyed him entirely or at least crushed 
 his individuality. 
 
 The tragedy of Nietzsche and his madness is 
 more than a particular case of a diseased philo- 
 sophical mind. It is the tragedy of modern 
 civilization. Almost all the important activities 
 of an individual are controlled, officially and 
 unofficially, by the State. He can develop 
 freely only within the limits in which the State 
 circumscribes him. Thus we arrive at the para- 
 dox, the baneful contradiction, that while the 
 growth of society requires individual govern- 
 ing forces in ever larger and larger numbers, 
 the State, which is identified with society, sup- 
 presses all these forces ; while the one unifying 
 force of society is the free individual, the State 
 hampers the process of solidarization. Until
 
 24 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the rise of democratic governments the mili- 
 tary machine alone was open to the criticism of 
 being the extreme of centralism. Now cen- 
 tralism has become the characteristic of all 
 states. 
 
 That the power derived from centralism is 
 purely mechanical is obvious. Mechanicism is 
 concerned only with utilitarianism. Moral 
 problems are quite outside its province. Our 
 modern states are all children of Bentham, 
 children of his idea of supreme utilitarianism. 
 Consequently all our endeavors, all our in- 
 stincts and impulses are directed not towards 
 the producing of real values, but are made sub- 
 servient to the practical utilitarian needs of 
 the State. Everything, including religion, is 
 placed at the service of the State. Christianity 
 is more of a governmental tool now than it was 
 even in the days of the theocratic aspirations of 
 the Roman popes. Patriotism has become the 
 weapon of national egotism. Nationalism has 
 degenerated into a kind of self-assertive Mes- 
 sianism, with every nation, great or small, 
 considering itself the supreme people who 
 would bring salvation to the world. Thus, if 
 our new society possesses any moral basis at all, 
 it is merely the moral basis of a utiHtarian,
 
 The Impasse of Politics 25 
 
 mechanical system, and the morality of that is 
 infinitesimal. 
 
 In internal politics our methods are the same 
 as in international relations. Machiavelli said 
 that Christianity was a doctrine for sheep 
 among wolves. Treitschke declared that not to 
 lie was a monk's virtue. He also said that poli- 
 ticians would become more moral only when 
 morals became more political. In these sen- 
 tences is reflected the essential spirit of our 
 times. Brailsford, in one of his articles, shows 
 very clearly how international politics is based 
 on pure practicalism and veiled in high falutin 
 moral phrases. Hindenburg cabled to the 
 Turkish Enver Pasha and urged him not to 
 kill any more Armenians. His message was 
 unheeded, but Turkey was not dropped as an 
 ally. Kitchener or Lloyd George did not even 
 cable to Nicholas the Second to ask him to stop 
 the massacres in Galicia and in eastern Russia. 
 And the Tsar was an ally. 
 
 The pretense of following a principle in in- 
 ternal politics merely accentuates the poverty 
 and the moral emptiness of our age. In inter- 
 national relations even such a pretense is hardly 
 made. Diplomacy, secret diplomacy, secret ne- 
 gotiations, secret propaganda, official spies, are
 
 26 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the generally recognized and universally em- 
 ployed tools in international politics. It is 
 useless to enter into a detailed discussion of 
 economic imperialism. Too much has already 
 been said and written about it. Economic im- 
 perialism has no special meaning, nor was it the 
 sole cause of the world crisis. It is merely one 
 of the most acute forms of the general disease. 
 
 Yet a brief word about economic imperial- 
 ism. "What is the significance of it? Economic 
 imperialism means that the State — I empha- 
 size again, the State, and not society, — consid- 
 ers itself as the supreme force, as the Messiah, 
 of its people, and tries to rule as much as pos- 
 sible and over as many as possible. Living as 
 we do in a period of great industrial develop- 
 ment and high economic attainment, the crown 
 of our moral emptiness and individual sup- 
 pression is economic imperialism, instead of the 
 old-fashioned imperialism. 
 
 Some economic elements there were in Na- 
 poleon's rule also. There was a very strong 
 economic element in Bismarck's campaigns 
 against Austria in 1866, and against France in 
 1871 ; but it is undeniable that the vital historic 
 factors of the Napoleonic times were the new 
 liberty, the centralization of the third estate.
 
 The Impasse of Politics 27 
 
 and the introduction into the State, formally 
 at least, of a new element of society. 
 
 Bismarck's period witnessed the rise of a 
 purely national movement, backed by the vast 
 economic resources which the rapid develop- 
 ment of industry put into its hands. If the 
 slogan of 1796-1811 was "Liberty," the slogan 
 of 1848-1871 was "national unity." That of 
 1914-1919 was the "world-market." But the 
 substance of all was the same. A ray of sun- 
 light is composed of many colors, and whether 
 the refraction gives blue, yellow or light, the 
 substance is the same. 
 
 Society is now undergoing another period of 
 "stress and strain." Economically speaking, 
 the Third Estate is as bankrupt as the feudal 
 states were at the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. The Fourth Estate is coming into life. 
 But are there any new social and moral values 
 involved in this rearrangement of our political 
 groups? Have the instruments of the trans- 
 formation themselves been changed? 
 
 At present two slogans can be distinguished 
 above the clamor of old part}'- cries. One is, 
 that the future belongs to labor. The other, 
 that Socialism is now at the point of realiza- 
 tion. Let us consider these two ideas for the
 
 28 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 moment from the point of view of society and 
 the state. We shall look at them from a dif- 
 ferent angle in the chapter on Revolution. 
 
 For the present we have to note that Marx- 
 ism, on the eve of the third decade of the twen- 
 tieth century, has no longer the sanction of a 
 divine revelation, even to a socialist. Through 
 the lifting haze that rested over thought 
 for almost three-quarters of a century we can 
 now see that the so-called economic interpre- 
 tation of history did no more than provide us 
 with a method. It left out of its reckoning such 
 elements as national spirit, moral principles, 
 and individual activity. In order to be con- 
 sistent, Marx had to deny the role of the in- 
 dividual in history. Refusing to recognize the 
 cultural values of nationality, he was forced to 
 reduce it to a zoological prejudice. He com- 
 pelled himself to deny the drive and motive 
 force of ideas, and he thus eliminated psychol- 
 ogy as an independent factor from his system. 
 He had to maintain that psychological ele- 
 ments only arose passively from the interplay 
 of economic forces and that they had no deter- 
 minative power in themselves. 
 
 But in the light of the recent war a crude 
 Marxism wilts into absurdity. The uni-
 
 The Impasse of Politics 29 
 
 versal proletariat were not rational enough to 
 be economic men in either the Benthamite or the 
 Marxian sense. Purely psychological forces, 
 the drive of instinct to rally with the herd, the 
 spur of sentiment, the regulation of habit, 
 caused the proletariat to jeopardize their class 
 interests for the sake of plans against which 
 they had long been in obstinate intellectual op- 
 position. Individual ambition, too, swept away 
 the economic alignments and played its fatal 
 part in the march of events. The war magni- 
 fied the brute forces of personality. The most 
 economic man, the proletarian, was first of all 
 a man! 
 
 Among the officers of state this phenomenon 
 was perhaps even more marked. The osten- 
 sible leaders, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, for 
 example, were perhaps purely the product of 
 their time and environment, the puppets of a 
 determinist Punch and Judy show. But be- 
 hind the scenes were the unseen manipulators 
 of the strings, the active personalities, the men 
 who were the creators as well as the creatures 
 of their environment. Berchtold and Beth- 
 mann-Hollweg, Tisza and the Grand Duke 
 Nicholas, and many others who are still per- 
 haps unknown, were themselves original forces,
 
 30 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 and their individual powers effected important 
 results. Indeed, is not Lenin himself a striking 
 example in refutation of Marx's denial of the 
 individual? Under an individual like Lenin, 
 surrounded by a few ardent aides, the least 
 industrial, least class-conscious, least educated, 
 least proletarian country in Europe was trans- 
 formed in the course of a year into the most 
 centralized and most audacious experimental 
 laboratory of Sociahst theories. What part 
 did the blind evolution of economic forces have 
 to play in that transformation ? On the Marx- 
 ian theory Russia was least of all "ready" for 
 Socialism. A handful of Marxian enthusiasts 
 wrecked the theoretical conspectus of their 
 master. In the act of realizing his dreams they 
 overthrew his theories. 
 
 Now it is important that we should realize 
 that Marxism as a conception of state, as a 
 theory of group initiative, does not differ ma- 
 terially from the classic doctrines of Bentham, 
 Hobbes, and IMachiavelli. Politically and 
 psychologically it rests upon insufficiently crit- 
 icized foundations. Marx's extreme interna- 
 tionalism does not imply a denial of the state: 
 it justifies the supremacy of an international 
 state. Even his conception of liberty is not the
 
 The Impasse of Politics 31 
 
 belief in a positive value, but in a negative in- 
 strument. To Marx liberty means simply 
 liberation, the gesture of escape, the relief from 
 oppression. "When Marx observed in 1848 
 that the proletarian has no fatherland, he was 
 only in temporary reaction against chauvinism. 
 A positive conception of citizenship was never 
 apparently formulated by him. Had he said 
 that the proletarian was a citizen of all father- 
 lands his dictum, if no closer to fact, would at 
 any rate have pointed the way to an ideal. The 
 working out of an active proletarian citizen- 
 ship might have kept the structure of Interna- 
 tional Socialism from breaking down at the 
 outbreak of the war. Patriotic and national 
 sentiments, in the best sense, are obviously val- 
 uable instrumentalities, and the refusal to take 
 advantage of them and direct them and profit 
 by them was no small factor in weakening the 
 international movement. From this point of 
 view neither Scheidemann nor Henderson, 
 neither George Plekhanov nor Albert Thomas, 
 are to be reproached for their impulsive pa- 
 triotism. A wise internationalism, proletarian 
 or bourgeois, must always reckon with its ma- 
 terials. And in this the Marxians failed as 
 completely as the Cobdenites.
 
 32 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 The catalog of Marx's psychological errors 
 might be lengthened. He urged, for example, 
 the right of the proletarian to leisure. In part, 
 this was an obvious reaction against the ex- 
 hausting work-day characteristic of machine 
 production; in part, it was an unconscious 
 adoption of the canons of leisure erected by 
 the bourgeoisie whom he contemned. From a 
 sociological point of view he had better have 
 urged the obligation of labor upon all, for this 
 would not then have eliminated from "labor" 
 the notion of its social and ethical value for 
 personality, apart from its contribution to an 
 ultimate product. It was left to the thinkers 
 of less industrialized countries than England 
 or Germany — Russia in particular, and writ- 
 ers like Herzen, Lavrov, and Mikhailovsky 
 for choice — to elaborate a genuinely sociologi- 
 cal theory of labor. To Marx labor meant only 
 a contribution to production; to these Russian 
 thinkers it meant a gift to society. (It is un- 
 fortunate, by the way, that the English-read- 
 ing public's only opportunity thus far to know 
 Mikhailovsky was but recently thrown open 
 by the publication of Professor Masaryk's 
 book "The Spirit of Russia.") 
 
 There is no need to labor the point : the main
 
 The Impasse of Politics 33 
 
 elements of Marxism as a theory of society rest 
 for the most part on antiquated mechanical 
 conceptions. Because Marxism did not suffi- 
 ciently absorb the advancing discoveries of psy- 
 chology it was unable to repair its social 
 deficiencies, and as a result we have been forced 
 to witness a disintegration of INIarxism 
 throughout the world. The best demonstra- 
 tion that an idea is losing its original integrity 
 and vigor comes when its various adherents 
 form sects which claim authoritatively to in- 
 terpret it, and which conflict among themselves 
 more heartily than they are able to unite 
 against their opponents. This has happened to 
 Marxism. The cries of schism and heresy 
 abound; there are factions within factions; 
 and right and left wings flap with aimless en- 
 ergy without lifting the body politic a single 
 foot from the ground. An international move- 
 ment that embraces both Noske and Lenin 
 must obviously attempt to move in two oppo- 
 site directions: and if a body is pushed with 
 equal force in opposite directions it will not 
 move at alL That is the impasse of present- 
 day Socialism. The "movement" is at a stand- 
 still. 
 
 In mediaeval times the doctrines of Chris-
 
 34 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tianity found themselves in a similar plight, as 
 a result of similar breaches, divergences, and 
 misunderstandings. Loyola and Savonarola 
 each claimed to represent the true spirit of 
 Christian resignation, and the only issue from 
 the deadlock of the Inquisition was a Luther 
 on one hand or a Medici on the other. We 
 need such a definite cleavage, such a clear-cut 
 joining of issues to-day, in order that we rid 
 ourselves of traditional, authoritative Marx- 
 ism and reach out towards a third alternative. 
 Along the present lines no movement is pos- 
 sible other than dissolution. We must there- 
 fore seek new ways, new means, new issues. 
 In so far as Socialist thought is concerned 
 there are indications of a forthcoming renewal. 
 In the idea of Guild Sociahsm is the promise 
 of a middle term which will involve an actual 
 advance to new ground rather than a recessive 
 compromise. Over our social thought, at least, 
 a new light seems about to break. Whether it 
 will influence our conduct, whether it will guide 
 our movements, whether it will lead us into a 
 new day are questions whose answers are still 
 to be written.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE DEBAUCH OF EUEOPEAN THOUGHT 
 
 If we are to understand the complicated 
 problems of our civilization it will first of all 
 be necessary, I believe, to discover the extent 
 to which we actually possessed a civilization. 
 The word itself is full of vague justifications 
 and assumptions. It was under the banner of 
 a new civilization that the belligerent peoples 
 rose in arms for the world war. Under the 
 same banner they have risen for revolution. 
 Under the same banner the old order takes up 
 the challenge to defend itself against the forces 
 of protest. War and peace, reaction and revo- 
 lution, justify themselves by this common 
 standard, which each claims for its own. It is 
 evidently high time to ask what, really, does 
 civilization mean? 
 
 The same necessity for intellectual criticism 
 attaches to the word democracy. Words origi- 
 nally significant of high ideas and purposes 
 
 35
 
 36 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tend, in the course of time, to dissipate their 
 meaning, and the rate of dissipation is usually 
 proportional to the extent to which they are 
 used. When popular speech has all but lost 
 for words like "democracy" any vestige of in- 
 tellectual content it is proper for the critic 
 either to redefine the word so as to conform to 
 new circumstances, or to cast it altogether 
 aside. Where now is democracy? Is it in the 
 abolition of the constitutional and parlia- 
 mentary guarantees in parliamentarism's na- 
 tive land, England, and in its liberty-loving 
 offspring, the United States? And where is 
 civilization? Is it in the submarine warfare of 
 von Tirpitz; in the Allied blockade of Russia; 
 in the ruthless suppression of Egypt; in the 
 "friendly" agreement for dominating Persia? 
 Is it in the teutonophobe scientists of England 
 and France, or in the hypocritical prostitution 
 practised in Germany by men, for example, 
 like Werner Sombart? 
 
 We in Russia have learned to appraise civi- 
 lization, for our civilization, unlike that of most 
 Western European countries, has to some ex- 
 tent been completely adopted, and has there- 
 fore been the outcome of choice. In the eigh- 
 teenth century, about the time of the Empress
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 37 
 
 Catherine II, or somewhat later, Russian intel- 
 lectuals initiated an interminable and some- 
 times acrid discussion on the subject of east- 
 ern and western civilization. They wished to 
 determine the lines upon which civilization 
 should move in the Russia of the future. Put- 
 ting aside the chauvinists, those interpreters of 
 Russian civilization who wrote and thought 
 only to conserve the old order, we had two 
 strong parties. On one side were the Slavo- 
 phils; on the other, the partisans of western 
 civilization. As far back as the fifth decade 
 of the last century one of our great intellec- 
 tuals, Hertzen, who had spent almost all his 
 life in Europe, uttered a warning which now 
 appears almost prophetic. He urged us to 
 guard Russia against the assimilation of the 
 "rotten and dying European civilization." He 
 indicated that what had been thought a con- 
 test between two civilizations was really a 
 struggle of life and death. 
 
 The course of events has profoundly justified 
 Herzen's vision. We must confess that, at the 
 touch of the world war, every human element 
 went — like the corpse in Poe's story — into a 
 state of putrid dissolution. Our world civili- 
 zation proved bankrupt, because in the moment
 
 38 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 of greatest moral and intellectual stress the 
 most prominent representatives of "civiliza- 
 tion" demonstrated themselves the most active 
 inspirers of animosity and destruction. 
 
 Whatever civilization may be we have some 
 general agreement as to its products. Science 
 and art and philosophy and general standards 
 of conduct, if they do not compose civilization, 
 are at any rate its outward manifestation. For 
 the purpose of our examination we shall take 
 science and art and philosophy as the equiva- 
 lent of that more comprehensive movement of 
 the mind which stricter usage might designate 
 as civilization. What then were the charac- 
 teristics of civilization in the period before the 
 war and during the war itself? How shall 
 we sum up the spirit of our science? (By 
 science I mean not what is usually included in 
 university courses: I use the term for lack of 
 a European equivalent, in the Russian sense, 
 to signify our whole complex of knowledge, 
 in the arts as well as the mechanical disci- 
 plines.) 
 
 Our science has marched along two separate 
 paths. That part which did not directly con- 
 cern itself with social problems had developed 
 to the highest degree along lines of technical.
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 39 
 
 economic, commercial and military progress. 
 The engineer, the financier, the strategist, ex- 
 ercised a power never before approximated. 
 The "practical" sciences transformed the outer 
 shell of hfe. The social and general sciences, 
 on the other hand, pursued a sohtary and inef- 
 fectual course. In comparison with the pure 
 sciences the humanities went backward, and 
 their retrogression was due chiefly to their en- 
 deavor to imitate the methods of pure science. 
 History and sociology sought the material for 
 their generalizations in a petrified past which 
 had lost all immediate value and relevance. 
 They attempted to reconstitute the shell of 
 civilization without taking into account the 
 vital chemistry that had created it. Where 
 the social sciences were cocksure they had not 
 advanced beyond classification; where they 
 were more dubious about their results they had 
 not developed more than a technique of hazy 
 generalization. I do not wish unduly to de- 
 preciate the historical and philosophic work of 
 the last thirty years. Much of it has a per- 
 manent value. I wish only to point out that 
 history and philosophy had separated them- 
 selves from life, and that they tended to con- 
 sider life as a machine whose parts they could
 
 40 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 take out and work upon separately. Therein 
 lay their error. When a physicist experiments 
 with inert materials, discovers fresh uniformi- 
 ties in their behavior, and applies his knowledge 
 to new inventions he follows the only course 
 open to him, and his success amply justifies his 
 method. But the historian and the sociologist 
 cannot do likewise with the living institutions 
 of our times without losing altogether his sense 
 of vital reality. The mechanistic technique of 
 the social sciences left them sterile and unpro- 
 ductive of social results. Life as an active 
 process, humanity as a complex of millions of 
 interactions — success in the social sciences 
 rested on a recognition of these fundamental 
 facts. And the social sciences did not rival the 
 physical sciences in achieving success because 
 the basic peculiarities of vital reactions were 
 forgbtten. Pragmatism was practically the 
 first protest against this dessicated method of 
 dealing with the facts of life. And it is with 
 painful slowness that the more flexible tech- 
 nique of James and Bergson, of Ostwald and 
 Levy Bruhl, has won its way to acceptance. 
 The real philosophy of life, for life, and within 
 life, is just beginning to be formulated. It re- 
 gards life as a continuously active process, not
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 41 
 
 as a series of mechanical actions. If philoso- 
 phy and sociology have had no influence over 
 life it is because they have not been practically 
 concerned with it in its totality. They have cut 
 it into segments, they have killed it, as prelim- 
 inary to discovering in what manner it works! 
 As far as the social sciences are concerned, 
 accordingly, we may characterize the period 
 just passed as a period of materialism. It was 
 not necessary to be a Marxian or a Socialist 
 in order to adopt the materialistic point of 
 view. Typical in the social sciences were men 
 like Seligman in the United States, Werner 
 Sombart in Germany, and, to a certain extent, 
 Durkheim in France and Loria in Italy. 
 The mechanical and industrial developments 
 of the time had so affected thought that all the 
 other prime elements of life were put intellec- 
 tually into the discard. It was generally sup- 
 posed that one element alone in history was 
 responsible for the progress of the race — 
 namely, economics. The more penetrating 
 thinkers realized the insufficiency of this creed 
 at the outset of their philosophic work: hence 
 John Dewey, for example, has tried to find a 
 place for our more fundamental natural im- 
 pulses in a biological conception of society, and
 
 42 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 Bertrand Russell, for the same reason, has en- 
 deavored to emphasize the psychological fac- 
 tors. But, except by way of individual re- 
 action, there was no escape. Materialism was 
 dominant. Beneath the grime of industrial- 
 ism and mechanics the faint flush of vitalism 
 could barely be detected. 
 
 It is not necessary to criticize the material- 
 istic conceptions of life: it is only necessary 
 to recognize them for what they are worth. In 
 sociology and in practical affairs they led to 
 a condition of social indifferentism. The so- 
 cial sciences neglected, in so far as it was pos- 
 sible, our contemporary problems, for the rea- 
 son that what is contemporary, living, active, 
 cannot be finally analyzed or generalized. 
 Economics and the other social sciences rushed 
 into a crass utilitarianism. Politics, as I have 
 already noted, followed the same course. Life, 
 history, humanity found themselves surrounded 
 by an iron band of materialistic laws and proc- 
 esses. Caught within that circle, paralyzed by 
 the thought of being unable to escape, our 
 social affairs dragged inexorably nearer and 
 nearer a certain end. It mattered little what 
 end — pure parliamentarianism with the con- 
 servatives; pure anarchy or Socialism with the
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 43 
 
 revolutionists. The nearer we approached the 
 fatal days of the war the more clearly could we 
 perceive the dangers of collapse. Even in the 
 most active and inspired movement, that of 
 the Socialists, the same materialistic principles 
 reigned. The main idea was organization. 
 Mechanical combination, the union of individ- 
 uals into larger groups, the automatic driving 
 force of machinery were the ends which were 
 sought, for example, by that representative 
 popular party, the German Social Democracy. 
 Nowhere could the evil results of this principle 
 be more starkly evident. The German Social 
 Democrats, albeit they possessed the most 
 powerful political organization within any 
 state and had elected the greatest number of 
 parliamentary representatives, were the least 
 active and the least creative of social groups. 
 They were the victims, in a sense, of their or- 
 ganization. When the war came on they pre- 
 served their machine by wrecking its useful- 
 ness to international social democracy. 
 
 It is strange how symbolic separate facts 
 and events sometimes seem in looking back- 
 ward. There was perhaps one man in Europe 
 who was capable of infusing a new vitality 
 into the Socialist movement. Jean Jaures could
 
 44 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 perhaps have ralhed the new forces of vital 
 self-determination — but he was murdered on 
 the eve of the war. One might say that Eu- 
 rope, having gone far along the path of de- 
 generation, thus committed the last act of 
 self-destruction. She murdered the individ- 
 ual she could not corrupt. The death of Jaures 
 was symbolic of what happened all over 
 Europe to individuality and genius. 
 
 In my introduction I quoted Romain Hol- 
 land's reference to the mediocrity of our time. 
 We may now clearly see that not only politics, 
 but science and social thought have contribu- 
 ted to the mediocrity of our society, by 
 contributing falsely mechanical ideas of de- 
 mocracy. Napoleon conceived equality as the 
 equality of all individuals in their responsi- 
 bility to the state. Contemporary Europe 
 practically understood democracy and equality 
 as a process of levelization — reducing all the 
 characteristic features of the social landscape to 
 an intolerably monotonous plain. Democracy 
 in its contemporary aspect (I shall never tire 
 of repeating it) brought us to the active elimi- 
 nation of originality. Instead of following the 
 individual's impetus to lift the masses to a 
 higher level, we sought by force to make the
 
 The Dehauch of European Thought 45 
 
 individual conform to the lower standards im- 
 posed by the state machine. Science, and es- 
 pecially social and political science, with their 
 economic determinism, only confirmed that 
 process. 
 
 It is perhaps too early to pronounce a final 
 judgment on this subject. We are not as yet 
 in a position to operate with political and so- 
 cial constants, even though these have tended 
 to fix themselves in our thought. In order to 
 demonstrate the correctness of our view of the 
 democratic process, it will prove more fruitful 
 to turn to another field, that of art and liter- 
 ature. 
 
 In Europe and America there has been 
 something of a prejudice against the treatment 
 of art and literature from the social point of 
 view. Even now, when the private life of the 
 average man is inextricably bound up with 
 political and social problems, "cultivated" peo- 
 ple are somewhat insensible to social evalu- 
 ations and appreciations of literature. The 
 attitude of a reviewer in the London "Nation" 
 towards Professor ^lasaryk's book on Russian 
 literature is representative. Masaryk, follow- 
 ing the most influential Russian tradition, 
 treats literature as a direct manifestation of
 
 46 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 social life. He shows the significance of 
 
 the great Russian writers in relation to their 
 
 time and milieu. Accordingly the reviewer 
 complains that Masaryk neglects artistic 
 
 values, and criticizes the author strongly for 
 neglecting what, from the European point 
 of view, is the central contribution of liter- 
 ature. This prejudice in favor of "pure" art 
 is widespread. It is indicative of a habit of 
 mechanically separating life into compart- 
 ments, or sanctuaries, and it is therefore a 
 denial of the organic integrity of every mani- 
 festation of life. 
 
 The fallacy of this point of view is, to me as 
 a Russian, apparent. Literature does not 
 merely add something to life by way of private 
 esthetic satisfactions: it is a mighty stream 
 whose many branches irrigate every region of 
 existence. Science can utilize much of its ma- 
 terials. The Russian and French psycho- 
 analysts have found in Dostoyevsky and 
 De Maupassant an inexhaustible treasure house 
 for scientific investigation. The perpetual 
 reference of literature to our social life is in- 
 escapable. One may here recall that part of 
 Bergson's "Creative Evolution" in which he de- 
 velops the idea of the vital impetus (elan vital)
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 47 
 
 with reference to its manifestations in litera- 
 ture. Where hfe is abnormal, where political 
 conditions are oppressive, where social habits 
 are repressive, where dead conventions bring 
 about an automatic, mechanical life, only one 
 way is left to reflect the aspirations, ideas, the 
 struggle, and the efforts of the individual — 
 the way of literature. In the life of the imagi- 
 nation, in the intimate medium of one's pains 
 and doubts, internal protests and dreaming as- 
 pirations, are born the simple fictions, the series 
 of images and dreams, which we call liter- 
 ature. 
 
 Literature is the last refuge and asylum of 
 life. That is the reason why literature flour- 
 ishes in times of reaction and social tyranny. 
 The fecundity of literature in Russia during 
 the nineteenth century, the blackest period 
 of our history, is a witness to this truth. 
 Strangled in the last convulsive movement of 
 Russian autocracy the spirit of the Russian 
 people took wings and flew to the open spaces 
 of the soul. Now when literature is translated 
 and communicated to other peoples it brings 
 about a psychological interplay which adds to 
 the common stock of ideas and thoughts. The 
 success of Russian literature throughout the
 
 48 Tlie Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 world of late years is highly significant from 
 this point of view. Materialism had put west- 
 ern civilization under a yoke as heavy as that 
 of Russian autocracy. And western civiliza- 
 tion turned accordingly to the country that 
 had most swiftly and completely emancipated 
 itself from the forces of reaction by means of 
 its literature. Russian literature became a 
 world literature, because it was a regenerative 
 reaction from a world disease. 
 
 Of course this theory fails on the surface to 
 answer the obvious question — why did not 
 French, German, and English literature de- 
 velop along the same lines during this period? 
 The answer is not altogether obscure. In the 
 sense in which I use the word reaction it does 
 not merely apply to political autocracy: it ap- 
 plies to more widespread social methods and 
 principles of behavior, even though the adher- 
 , ents of reaction march under the banners of 
 civilization, freedom, democracy, or revolution. 
 Reaction in this sense has two phases. In one 
 case certain conscious political agents overtly 
 attempt to suppress the individual forces of 
 society. This type of reaction gives rise to a 
 widespread internal protest which moves up- 
 ward through all grades of society and pro-
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 49 
 
 duces strong individualities, who are competent 
 to voice an effective opposition. Such was the 
 case of Russia during the last three-quarters 
 of the nineteenth century. The other type of 
 reaction, that of Europe, is somewhat different. 
 Politically and socially Europe was more or 
 less democratic. That is to say, Europe en- 
 joyed constitutional freedom, and the forms 
 of an unrepressive political society were at 
 least outlined on paper. All the while, how- 
 ever, the processes of levelization and stand- 
 ardization were working in the opposite direc- 
 tion. Wider and wider provinces of social life 
 were, without protest, brought under the me- 
 chanical control of an impersonal — indeed, an 
 almost automatic — state. Before Europe 
 could realize its position the forces of individ- 
 uality were disintegrated. This kind of reac- 
 tion insidiously blocks up the creative impulses 
 of society. The individual is forced to live 
 meanly, and on a low level. And under these 
 conditions art and literature begin to decay. 
 Exceptional men of genius like Romain Rol- 
 land occasionally continued to crop up, but the 
 greater part of the contemporarj^ generation 
 in Europe remained in a state of inactivity, of 
 passive contemplation, and that is a state of
 
 50 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 spirit which favors assimilation from without 
 rather than independent creation from within. 
 Thus it happened that the Russian theater, 
 Russian music, the Russian ballet, the Russian 
 novel acquired during the last twenty-five years 
 a greater and greater influence throughout 
 Europe. 
 
 Science is a useful instrument for research, 
 but literature carries one actually to the thresh- 
 old of revelation. In almost all his writing 
 Bergson emphasizes that we do not know the 
 real nature of things ; even the widest scientific 
 knowledge does not carry us a step towards 
 that goal. We live among hazy, mysterious 
 generalities, the secret reality of which we feel 
 only by our direct, creative intuition. At times 
 that intuition lifts the curtain which divides us 
 from the real world, and we give birth to beau- 
 tiful dreams and poetical creations. The man 
 who could at will raise that curtain of deadly 
 obscurity would see such wonderful pictures of 
 life that he would be the greatest of philosophic 
 geniuses, the greatest of poetical geniuses, and 
 the greatest of musical geniuses — all at one and 
 the same time. With Bergson's description of 
 the role of intuition I heartily agree. In the 
 final analysis Bergson sees no line of demarca-
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 51 
 
 tion between scientific thought and artistic cre- 
 ation. They are each legitimate ; they are each, 
 for its own purpose, vahd. Literature does not 
 merely deal with the accidental and the local 
 and the temporary: it reflects our deepest in- 
 sights just as faithfully as science or philoso- 
 phy. In a period of social stress literature be- 
 comes a precious source of knowledge. 
 
 The reader will now understand why an at- 
 tempt to see through the medium of modern 
 literature the features and meaning of our 
 modern social life is, to my mind, a hopeful and 
 important undertaking. I am not pretending 
 to make a thorough analysis of the subject; to 
 do that would be to write another book. I wish 
 only to indicate the main points of departure 
 and determine roughly the principal bound- 
 aries. 
 
 Romain Holland's "Jean Christophe" is a 
 landmark in contemporary literature. Pre- 
 eminently it is a social novel, whose roots top 
 every level of society. What are the conclu- 
 sions to be drawn from it? "What is the final 
 impression that it leaves? Briefly this: that 
 our society with its dwarfed standards, its 
 smug, torpid self-satisfaction, has no place for 
 youth, for creative activity, for individual
 
 52 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 forces. In such a society old Jean Christophe, 
 lonely and sad, meets death without a single 
 tremor of regret. The old half-sarcastic prin- 
 ciple of Mephisto — ''Enthehren sollst du, sollst 
 enthehren" prevailed in every department. 
 Love, popularity, personal satisfaction, popu- 
 lar approbation, all these things came either too 
 late or not at all. The real rulers, the real 
 kings of society, in life, in art and in politics, 
 are little newsboys shouting extras on the 
 streets. Greatness had no place in life. There, 
 Rolland pointed out, lay the weakness of our 
 society. It had no mind of its own, no individ- 
 uality of its own — in short, no integrity. With 
 Holland's analysis in view the general collapse 
 of European society, the world war, and the 
 revolutions were inevitable. As we read the 
 last pages of his "Jean Christophe," written in 
 1910-1912, we are amazed at Romain Holland's 
 perspicacity. To his mind, war, not as an issue 
 for salvation, but as a destructive blow to all 
 that exists, was inevitable. He did not will it, 
 but he felt its force growing more and more. 
 He knew that it would be impossible to dam 
 the stream. The sohd mass of European so- 
 ciety was moving toward war with irresistible 
 momentum.
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 53 
 
 In a recent novel by a young Russian writer, 
 Ilya Sourgouchov, entitled "The Mill," there is 
 a description of a Russian student, sitting, 
 slightly drunk, on a bench in a city park, look- 
 ing into the dark blue sky of the night, sprin- 
 kled with myriads of stars. This student, Ivan 
 Ivanovitch, says to his friend — "How corrupt 
 is our life! In the old times we used to walk 
 slowly and with dignity. We used to pray to 
 God with devotion and faith. We were liv- 
 ing, breathing fresh air into our free, healthy 
 bodies, encouraging our free, healthy spirits. 
 And now it is amazing in what a hurry people 
 are. It seems that they have no time, they 
 must hurry, they must travel two hundred 
 miles an hour. They have to celebrate a mass 
 in twenty minutes. The old classical beauty 
 has gone from speech. We have little one-act 
 performances, little bits of ragtime music, like 
 musical cakes. Everything, everyone, is in a 
 hurry as if they were all in a big railroad sta- 
 tion. Why this hurry? People do not know. 
 They are driven by some kind of brutal force. 
 And what will be the result?" (Drunken Ivan 
 Ivanovitch asks the question with a smile.) 
 "The machine is going on with such a rush, the 
 hurry is so great, there must be a wreck. All
 
 54 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 will be mixed together. Nobody will be able 
 to stop the great speed, and the blue sky and 
 the golden stars, the railroad stations, the long 
 trains, the musical cakes, all will be broken to 
 pieces and will fall like little drops of rain in a 
 hurricane. All will be crushed by the swiftly 
 speeding wheel of the world mill." 
 
 Ivan Ivanovitch was, after a fashion, a 
 'prophet. He feared the hurry. He felt the 
 spirit of the times. His dream, half fantasy, 
 half lyrical delirium, is not without meaning. 
 Who was the hero of our modern age? The 
 great nobody. What was the aim of that mill- 
 like life ? A vast nothing. 
 
 While in 1890 the pessimistic fighter, Ibsen, 
 represented the spirit of our aspirations and 
 ideals, on the eve of the twentieth century we 
 had to face the absolute elimination of the in- 
 dividual from a life in harmonious adjustment. 
 The new individualism, the post-Ibsen one, 
 tried to run away from life and what is human. 
 It sought satisfaction in artificial excitations, 
 and that is the real cause of the sexual period in 
 literature some few years ago. With Otto 
 Weininger and his "Sex and Character," with 
 Artzibasheff and "Sanine," with the revived 
 popularity of Catulle Mendes, and some spe-
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 55 
 
 cial writings of Marcel Prevost, the reign of 
 the boulevard literature came into being. 
 
 On the other hand, and parallel with this, an- 
 other process took place. Human thought, 
 tired and exhausted, tried to take refuge in 
 new forms which would make it forget the de- 
 cay of dull standards and traditions. Peter 
 Allenberg is one of the best examples of that 
 kind of neurotic impressionism which seeks re- 
 lief from the impact of reality. The dissolute 
 brain under such conditions is satisfied by a 
 hint, by a half word, without descriptions, with- 
 out any naturalistic rendering of life, since real 
 life has lost its value and its real meaning. 
 The human heart and mind became less and 
 less active. They were satisfied with individ- 
 ual, sometimes intensely personal, contempla- 
 tions. The movement in painting which is 
 called intimism, or the contemplative art of 
 the French poet, Francis Jammes, are very 
 characteristic from this point of view. One 
 has not to be in life in order to live, or to 
 breathe life and fight for it. It is enough to 
 look over the waving waters of a lake and to 
 feel the intimate relations between the human 
 soul and nature's soul. 
 
 Europe indeed had some writers of the old
 
 56 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 school, with brains and nerves of the old type, 
 — Henry de Regnier in France, and Carl 
 Schonherr in Germany, — ^but these exceptions 
 merely emphasize the rule. It is significant, 
 for instance, that Jack London and Maxim 
 Gorky were among the most popular writers in 
 Europe. Jack London felt in America those 
 elements which were imported from Europe, 
 and in a condensed and acute way he made 
 them his own. His "Martin Eden" was a re- 
 markably eloquent illustration and interpre- 
 tation of the European mind and the European 
 individual. Even when a great soul and a 
 great character were found, strong and vital, — 
 and a great soul was that of Martin Eden, — 
 they could live, aspire, and fight only as long 
 as they were outside of the general current, 
 somewhere in a dirty little six-by-eight room 
 in Oakland. Brought in the thick of life, they 
 preferred to sink deep beneath the waters of 
 the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 In the speed of the mill-wheel of European 
 life the education of our spirit was diverted to 
 a very peculiar kind of interest. The internal 
 protest of the individual instead of engender- 
 ing revolt and fight, degenerated into peculiari- 
 ties, idosyncrasies. Peculiarities took the place
 
 The Debauch of EurojJean Thought 57 
 
 of originality, as, for instance, futurism. Its 
 father, the Italian writer, Marinetti, is the 
 most characteristic product of our European 
 mind. The old and ever new, the eternal as- 
 piration of art to lift the curtain, to penetrate 
 the hazy screen which divides us from reality, 
 disappeared little by little. The street, the sig- 
 nals of the motor cars, the tremor of trains, 
 took the place of initiative and penetration into 
 life. Queer, weird, combinations of colors 
 without any meaning; colored cows, painted 
 horses, black noses, light blue hair, red ears, 
 navy blue hands, all that was strange and 
 weird and startling because of its weirdness, 
 became the object and the subject of futurism. 
 There was no other refuge, no other escape 
 from the old materials, and those who had con- 
 served in their souls the old feelings and the 
 old appreciations of hfe, were busily recording 
 the tendencies of our time and describing the 
 melancholy sinking of our sun. Wasserman, 
 Kellerman, even old Knut Hamsun, the 
 teacher of Kellerman, saw humanity as flot- 
 sam on the waves of the turbulent and unhappy 
 sea of life. Nagel, in "The Mysteries," by 
 Hamsun, might have other reasons and motives 
 than those of Martin Eden for finding his
 
 58 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 place also beneath the water, but he was con- 
 fronted by the same conditions, the same sterile 
 outlook. 
 
 The terrible pangs of hunger, the loneliness 
 and hopelessness which we find even in the 
 songs of love in "Victoria," or in the pass- 
 ing shades of Builder Solness' life, are the 
 main chords of the melancholy European 
 song. 
 
 When a European writer did have a concep- 
 tion of strength, of creative and persistent 
 power, he was forced to leave his European 
 soil and to transform his hero into an Ameri- 
 can as did Kellerman in his "Tunnel." The 
 remarkable engineer, Allan, who wanted to 
 connect two continents by means of a tun- 
 nel under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, 
 could not have been a European. He was too 
 strong, had too much life; too much of the 
 spirit burned in him. 
 
 These facts perhaps explain the popularity 
 of the Russian author Chekhov, in Germany, 
 in France, and in England during the last few 
 years and even now. And still Chekhov tells 
 only stories of the tired Russia of the 'nineties, 
 the land of gray human beings, of dull lives; 
 the writer of our intemperie when there was
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 59 
 
 no definite life, no definite aspirations; the 
 painter of many melancholy dreams, and too 
 few thoughts; too many words and too few- 
 actions. 
 
 Three names of men who were popular dur- 
 ing the last few years throughout Europe are 
 worthy of note — Oscar Wilde, Dostoyevsky, 
 and William J. Locke. Wilde belongs in 
 Europe to the decadents, to the sexual period 
 of Otto Weininger. At the present moment 
 our special interest lies not in his aesthetic 
 theories or in his philosophy of subtilizing 
 pleasure. What is characteristic of his in- 
 fluence is his philosophy of suffering as ex- 
 pressed in "De Profundis," his idea of the 
 leaden weight of the boy prince who had to 
 love but had no heart. When life is unable to 
 give joy one tries to idealize suffering. When 
 love is corrupted and reduced to Artzibasheff 's 
 physiology, or to the subtle flirtation of CatuUe 
 Mendes, a human being becomes a prince with- 
 out a heart. The swallow loves the prince and 
 suffers for him, but has to acknowledge finally 
 that the prince is a bronze statue and his eyes 
 are only precious stones, which look but do not 
 see, whose tears are only drops of cold 
 autumnal rain.
 
 60 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 The tragedy of those who think and those 
 who love was not only the eternal tragedy of 
 the individual who is lonely among crowds, but 
 the tragedy of a dying energy. The loneli- 
 ness of Lord Byron, his intense unhappiness, 
 did not prevent him from enjoying life, during 
 his famous Italian period. It did not prevent 
 him from dying for Greece's freedom, although 
 he knew the tragedy of "The Prisoner of Chil- 
 lon." The modern individual lies in Reading 
 gaol and suffers, and that is all. 
 
 William J. Locke, a star obviously of the 
 second order, was, during the last of the pre- 
 war years, the most popular writer in Europe. 
 This subtly cultured man, with his sophisti- 
 cated brain and amazing erudition, is a real 
 contemporary European. He employs all the 
 elements of life as keen tools for excitement, 
 mental, intellectual, spiritual and sensual. He 
 does not care very much, as a matter of fact, 
 about the significance of life and love. He 
 simply gives society a cinematographic reel of 
 sometimes exotic, sometimes elegantly Pari- 
 sian, sometimes wild, primitive pictures, and 
 covers the whole business with the web of "The 
 Morals of Marcus Ordeyne," a simple, lazj^ 
 disappointed, discouraged European, who
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 61 
 
 thinks in formulas of all philosophies, smokes 
 cigarettes, writes a diary, and is out of life for 
 a very simple reason. Having all the advan- 
 tages of a modern European, disappointment, 
 indifference, good taste, and leisure, he pos- 
 sesses an atavism, a disadvantage, — moral 
 honesty. 
 
 And last, Dostoyevsky, the one author who 
 remained popular after the period of the new 
 romanticism and the revival of Nietzsche. 
 Dostoyevsky, who is read as extensively in 
 France, in England, in Germany, as he is in 
 Russia, is perhaps the most interpretative ex- 
 ample of our European spirit. Full of ner- 
 vous revolt, unhealthy protest, anarchistic as- 
 pirations, all combined with a reactionary, 
 sarcastic disposition, Dostoyevsky's superman 
 never became mad, as did Nietzsche. He has 
 always normal reactions, but he is "possessed." 
 One can never forget that "The Possessed" of 
 Dostoyevsky are practically normal human be- 
 ings. They are "possessed" only in so far as 
 they play a part in a corrupt social life. It is 
 a mistake to consider this novel of Dostoyevsky 
 as a realistic picture of a part of Russian so- 
 ciety. It is rather a protest against and a 
 calumniation of those who dare to dream of
 
 62 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe ' 
 
 fighting against the general social and political 
 regime. "Crime and Punishment" are both ex- 
 citing elements of modern life. Punishment is 
 not that high conception of which Tolstoy 
 speaks, when he quotes the Gospel at the be- 
 ginning of Anna Karenina, but is an institu- 
 tion against a crime which is practically 
 permitted but only to certain people and under 
 certain forms. He who dares to violate the 
 general forms will be brutally punished. Ras- 
 kolnikoff had no right to kill the old woman, 
 but the many hundreds of thousands who were 
 killed in Russian gaols, in the colonial expedi- 
 tions of European states, on the streets of 
 Paris, London, and Berlin, with their "pois- 
 oned atmosphere" of morphine, cocaine, and 
 ether, were victims legally killed, by legal 
 forms, of the legally existing legal society. 
 Dostoyevsky's value for modern Europe lay in 
 his anarchistic, atrocious, unhealthy pessimism, 
 and as such he is one of the beloved European 
 authors. 
 
 But the most characteristic social feature of 
 our European literature has still to be inter-^ 
 preted — it is something for which I cannot 
 find a better word than the French "boule- 
 vard/^ Boulevard literature, street stories,
 
 The Debauch of Epropean Thought 63 
 
 sensational "stuff," gutter fiction were ram- 
 pant. There was a general lack of imagina- 
 tion, of real creative intuition, of new pictures, 
 and new terms which are to be transformed 
 into life, and a new life which is to be trans- 
 formed into new terms. There remained only 
 the crude primitive imagination of the earliest 
 years of childhood. Therefore the most popu- 
 lar art — if it can be called art — of recent years 
 in Europe confined itself to detective stories, 
 sensational reports of killings, suicides, and all 
 those events which temporarily stimulate the 
 jaded, easily satisfied tastes of the crowded 
 city boulevards. Thus, little by little, real art 
 was displaced by the cinematograph, which is 
 well known in Europe under the name of the 
 great "dumb." Words were worn out to such 
 an extent, and had become so banal, so dull, 
 that there was no longer any need of them. 
 The intuitive content and substance of art was 
 necessary to an exhausted imagination and a 
 mechanistic society. The pre-war years may 
 be called the decade of the decay of artistic 
 aspirations. Such exceptions as Rodin in 
 sculpture, and Max Reinhard and Gordon 
 Craig in the theater, only make the general 
 decay more pronounced. A Russian proverb
 
 64 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 says, "the darker the night the brighter the 
 stars," but the opposite of this is also true. 
 The stars brought out the blackness of the 
 night : and the night was everywhere. 
 
 From the masterpieces in our literary field 
 — the most popular until recently — Hedda 
 Gabbler and Builder Solness, Uncle Vanya 
 and The Three Sisters — we can only deduce 
 that the few remaining vital forces of individ- 
 uals were dying, smothered into oblivion by 
 the stolid weight of a mechanical society. Life 
 could not go on in that fashion without losing 
 its driving force. Society itself was suffering 
 from a sort of elephantiasis which slowed up 
 its motions and threatened to prostrate it by 
 the effect of its own weight. This condition 
 could not last any longer. Of whatever kind 
 it might be, a revolution had to take place. 
 From whatever quarter it might come, a de- 
 structive flood of insurgent human impulses 
 had to sweep over Europe and carry away all 
 debris and decay that the century of Napoleon- 
 ism had accumulated. To evoke a new crea- 
 tive impetus, or to create a new impetus, was 
 the drastic demand of the situation. The chan- 
 nels of life were blocked. Destruction in one 
 form or another, war or revolution matters
 
 The Debauch of European Thought 65 
 
 little, was necessary to open them. Mind and 
 soul felt the innate necessity for release. 
 
 That is what Romain Holland sensed — and 
 he was right. The war came.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MORASS OF WAE 
 
 The war came. It came not so much to 
 extinguish European civilization as to show 
 us more incisively what European civilization 
 was. It has become a platitude to say that the 
 great conflict was the result of economic causes : 
 we need not altogether spurn this interpreta- 
 tion in order to see that roots of the evil went 
 below the subsoil of capitalism and struck the 
 very bedrock of our spiritual life. The war 
 was a fungus that drew nourishment from the 
 dead tissue of the European spirit. But for 
 the decay of European civilization the war 
 could not have fastened upon society and 
 blighted the whole face of existence. 
 
 Doubtless the economic motives, especially 
 as they affected the statesmen, the industrial- 
 ists, and the financiers, are among the immedi- 
 ate causes of the disaster, and I shall try to 
 indicate their bearing more clearly in a subse- 
 
 66
 
 The Morass of War 67 
 
 quent chapter. In back of them, however, 
 lay more ultimate elements which account for 
 the destructive insurgence of martial effort in 
 every walk of life. Economic factors might 
 have pricked the governments to diplomatic 
 competition, but against these surface mani- 
 festations of belligerency, society, as such, could 
 have firmly held its ground. The Russo- 
 Japanese war, for example, was also an eco- 
 nomic war, but for all that it encountered an- 
 tagonism in Russia on every side, and its un- 
 popularity led to revolutionary disaffection. 
 The interesting peculiarity about the Great 
 War, on the contrary, was its popularity 
 among all the belligerent peoples. I have en- 
 deavored to indicate the reasons for this and 
 to expose the factors which paralyzed the re- 
 sistance of the masses. Intelligent observers 
 who lived in Europe in the ante-bellum days, 
 and who observed European conditions, saw 
 clearly that society, without respect to class 
 lines, was rapidly collapsing, and many of 
 them came to the conclusion that a stimulating 
 injection was necessary in order to rouse it 
 from its deep lethargic repose. The spirit of 
 "apres mot le deluge" had impregnated the en- 
 tire mind and soul of Europe. A thoughtful
 
 68 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 individual of creative inclinations faced an al- 
 most homogeneous mass of incredulity, coupled 
 with absolute indifference to new ideas and 
 thought. More and more influenced by the 
 "levelization" I have referred to, this mass re- 
 mained an unassimilable and immovable lump. 
 It is hard to say whether the purely mechanical 
 policy of capitalistic society had of set purpose 
 so educated the masses as to make them in- 
 capable of advancing in civilization, or whether 
 the masses themselves were moved by more im- 
 personal forces to the same impasse. But as 
 far as results go it matters little. Potentially, 
 society possessed vast reservoirs of knowledge 
 — the war brought that fact out by repeated 
 demonstrations — but every attempt to tap that 
 reservoir and harness it directly to the vital 
 activities of society was forced to encounter 
 an apathetic resistance which rarely could be 
 overcome. Hence our knowledge remained un- 
 utilized and our energies were frittered away 
 in anti-social and immoral diversions. 
 
 Illustrative of the weakness of our social 
 values was the overwhelming attention to a 
 "high standard of living." This was currently 
 supposed to be a main factor in civilization. 
 
 Everything was centered on a general drive
 
 The Morass of War 69 
 
 for prosperity. The outlook and ambitions of 
 the French "rentier" or of the German Biirger 
 permeated the European masses. The growth 
 and spread of so-called "Christian Socialism," 
 a movement that popularized submission and 
 passiveness among the Austrian and German 
 proletariat were significant, as indicative of a 
 conservative state of mind which aimed at 
 nothing higher than the acquisition of mate- 
 rial values. Instead of finding a vigorous de- 
 velopment of ideas within the ranks of the 
 proletariat or the advanced intellectuals, we 
 had to deal in these groups with the same 
 spirit that animated the bourgeoisie — the at- 
 tainment of immediate well being. It was a 
 period of social disintegration. The spirit of 
 solidarity was destroyed, the spirit that rises 
 sometimes from the depth of the national heart, 
 and shows that we are more than an accidental 
 concourse of individuals. A "gasolineless 
 Sunday" is more eloquent sometimes than any 
 statistical standard of living, and the war in 
 Europe emphasized these features. The so- 
 called "profiteers" in England and America, 
 the "accapareurs" in France, the speculator 
 in Russia, the "Roi Ziep" in Belgium, and the 
 Kriegsgewinner in Germany are illustrative
 
 70 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 types whose conduct flagrantly typified the 
 time. Certainly there has always been in every 
 war a group that fattened on the misery of the 
 thousands, but this last war has shown a gen- 
 eral, an almost universal tendency towards sel- 
 fish profiteering. Before the Russian revolu- 
 tion even, the most patriotic of all the belliger- 
 ent nations, France, had many so-called "em- 
 husques" (people who escaped from the front 
 on some pretext and found safe positions in 
 the rear), and there were many more in Rus- 
 sia and Germany. Yet our exhausted and 
 morally empty society accepted the war with- 
 out a protest, without any attempt at resist- 
 ance, because it was a tragically dramatic re- 
 lief from a dull banal life. 
 
 I recall the situation in August, 1918, when 
 I spent some time in Hungary, in Austria, 
 and in Germany. It was a revelation to me to 
 see that these peoples who were suffering in- 
 tensely from the war, who were weary of it, 
 were still enthusiastic. They were fighting a 
 fight for life and death. The national spirit 
 in Berlin, in Vienna, or in Budapest was 
 hardly less than that of Petrograd and Mos- 
 cow under Kerensky. A friend of mine, an 
 Austrian literary man, who was very bitter
 
 The Morass of War 71 
 
 against the war, said to me one day : "You do 
 not know ! You do not know ! Surely for you 
 the Allies are not merely allies, but saviours of 
 democracy ; but we know, because we know our 
 faults, that they want to smother us. They 
 want to close us within the iron band of their 
 military power. You are happy in the free- 
 dom you have so long wanted, but we are not 
 guilty because of having a Berchthold or a 
 Tisza. Had we not had them, France, two or 
 three or five years later, would have produced 
 a Berchthold or a Bethmann-Hollweg, and they 
 would have been the aggressors." Then he 
 added with a smile, "And perhaps we would 
 then have been the Allies of democracy." 
 
 Had I read these words in a book or news- 
 paper before I left Russia I would have ac- 
 cepted them with a skeptical smile, but after 
 witnessing the ravages of the war in the very 
 heart of the Central Powers, I felt how right, 
 how profoundly right, this Austrian friend of 
 mine — Dr. Richard Berman — was. When, 
 later, I saw Hungary and the rear of the 
 Italian front, — ^when I had looked at the ex- 
 hausted soldiers, weak, hungry, pale, and ill, 
 walking shadows of human beings, I foresaw 
 that we were at the beginning of the end ; that
 
 72 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the Allies would win the victory. My cold 
 reason told me that their victory would be the 
 lesser of two evils, and therefore, theoretically, 
 I was glad. But I felt a deep sorrow, too, and 
 above all a terrible and terrifying apprehen- 
 sion, as to the fate of the people. When I saw 
 on the shores of the beautiful Danube some 
 four or five hundred INIagyar and Croatian sol- 
 diers lying in the hot sun, eating with avidity 
 rotten watermelons that had been thrown away 
 as unfit for food, I asked myself, "Who is 
 right?" I understood as did everybody else, 
 that Kaiser Wilhelm and the Austrian Em- 
 peror were using these suffering men as mere 
 tools, but what made these men fight; what 
 made them willing to suffer hunger, misery, 
 illness, unspeakable wretchedness, and still 
 continue to fight ? It is a question of more than 
 psychological significance. They fought for 
 the same reason as did the Russians, the Eng- 
 lish, the French, and the Italian soldiers. They 
 fought because pre-war Europe had eradicated 
 individual aspirations and human feelings from 
 the people; because pre-war Europe had en- 
 riched the life of the people with nothing more 
 than the barren formalities of civilization — to 
 know how to read and write, to have a high
 
 The Morass of War 73 
 
 percentage of literacy. That was the "enlight- 
 enment" of which the European State boasted. 
 But it did not mean that the people were edu- 
 cated. The state did not care. In fact, it 
 rather feared education, because education 
 makes people self-conscious, and teaches con- 
 trol of the instincts by reason and love. The 
 common people fought, therefore, because they 
 were a mass, a mob that attributed to the physi- 
 cal enemy in the trenches the terrible frustra- 
 tion of their spiritual Hfe. It would have been 
 strange could they have recognized their real 
 enemy, and prepared themselves to fight the 
 real fight ! 
 
 There on the banks of the Danube, with the 
 wonderful royal palace and the architecturally 
 beautiful Parliament buildings on one side, and 
 on the other the mass of dirty soldiers eating 
 rotten watermelons, I remembered a descrip- 
 tion of Napoleon's campaign in Italy, which I 
 had read in a volume by Frederick Masson. 
 Young soldiers, sixteen years of age, used to 
 cry like babies deserted by their mothers when 
 Napoleon was driving them through the moun- 
 tains of Italy, smeared with blood and steeped 
 in misery, "to bring freedom to Italy." Who 
 was the liberator of Italy — Napoleon or Gari-
 
 74 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 baldi ? I saw no Garibaldi on either side of the 
 struggle in this war. I saw no light and no 
 right on either side. Napoleon commanded 
 both the victor and the defeated. . . . 
 
 On one of the battlefields of Galicia in July, 
 1917, immediately after an infantry attack, I 
 came across a healthy-looking giant of a Ger- 
 man soldier, dying in hysterical convulsions. 
 Two Russian soldiers had brought some cold 
 water and were endeavoring to help him. He 
 kept on crying and shivering until he lost con- 
 sciousness entirely. I followed the men as 
 they carried him to the nearest Red Cross tent, 
 where he was brought back to consciousness. 
 He was not wounded and when he had recov- 
 ered a little I asked him, "How long have you 
 been at the front?" "Three years," he an- 
 swered in a tone of utter despair, "three years," 
 and the hysterical crying began again. 
 
 The Russian social thinker, Mikhailovsky, 
 was accustomed to make a fine discrimination 
 between two aspects of truth — truth-verity and 
 truth- justice. I saw for the first time in my 
 life both these truths in this German soldier. 
 I saw neither on either side of the battlefield 
 itself. I was convinced that war was not the 
 issue or the way out. War is war, and all
 
 Tlie Morass of War 75 
 
 through the wars of Alexander the Great, 
 Xerxes of Persia, and Hannibal; through 
 those of Napoleon and Moltke down to the 
 present war, war was always war. Never has 
 it brought any solution of our problems. 
 Never has it helped civilization a step forward. 
 War may, perhaps, be inevitable at this pres- 
 ent stage of society, but it is inevitable only 
 in the sense in which smallpox is inevitable — 
 the only difference being that it does not bring 
 any immunity afterwards. 
 
 Nicholas Morosov, a Russian scientist and 
 revolutionist, who was imprisoned twenty-nine 
 years in solitary confinement, one day, on the 
 banks of the Volga, noticed a group of little 
 boys armed with sticks and wooden swords, 
 playing at soldiers. He remarked: — "War 
 will be done with, abolished as an institution, 
 not when international leagues and parliaments 
 have agreed that there shall be no more war, 
 but only when our children play no more at 
 being soldiers." I am reminded of Maupas- 
 sant, who took part in the campaign of 1870, 
 who was perhaps more bitter against the Prus- 
 sians than Clemenceau a couple of generations 
 later. He said that all human beings feel an 
 imperative necessity to destroy, to kill. They
 
 76 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 kill insects, and animals, for our pleasure. 
 (Read his wonderful novel, "The Wolf.") 
 And in some periods of history they kill them- 
 selves, and call it "national defense," "holy 
 war," etc. Somewhere else he says that when 
 the captain of a vessel fails to rescue his ship 
 from wreck he is brought before judges with- 
 out regard to his actual guilt. Why then, he 
 asks, are not the governments that failed to 
 prevent the war brought before a popular tri- 
 bunal after a war? A government is a captain, 
 and it has a right to its name only when it 
 either sinks with its ship or rescues the ship 
 and the crew. But no government has a right 
 to begin a war or to respond to a call for war. 
 We have not yet perhaps reached the stage 
 where governments are captains and children 
 cease to play with sticks for rifles and paper 
 caps for helmets; but the last five years have 
 made one thing clear: no war under any ban- 
 ner can ever be justified. There must be some 
 other method of reaching a decision. A war 
 against war jnust be accomplished without 
 mobilization and without tanks : if it is carried 
 on with old weapons it cannot possibly achieve 
 new results. To fight Mars in armor is to as- 
 sault him in his strongest position, and to ac-
 
 The Morass of War 77 
 
 cept his challenge on his own terms. His weak 
 point is not his armor but his head. Let us 
 not be blinded by wily metaphors. The paci- 
 fist who treated war as a disease and was will- 
 ing to be innoculated preventively should real- 
 ize by now that the vaccination was more dis- 
 astrous than smallpox could have been. We 
 must evolve an entirely new technique for deal- 
 ing with war. I do not pretend to have any 
 methods of my own, or to have discovered par- 
 ticular merit in those of anvone else, which 
 would encourage the immediate hope of abol- 
 ishing the irrational and brutal and ultimately 
 useless methods that have so long prevailed. 
 I am content to point out the necessity. 
 
 Viewed as a single dramatic act, it would 
 seem that the past war was a simple act of self- 
 destruction. By this terrible and drastic 
 method European society expiated almost a 
 century of hypocrisy. The testimony of Pro- 
 fessor Friedrich Foerster of Munich should 
 remind us sharply of our sins on this score. 
 One looks in vain through intellectual circles 
 in Europe for a more sterling moralist than 
 Professor Foerster. In the furnace heat of 
 war patriotism Foerster remained honestly and 
 sincerely pro-ally, as long as the Allies
 
 78 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 deserved sympathy — an anti- German who 
 could stand out even among Frenchmen. As 
 an exile from his home country, who suffered 
 for his beliefs, Foerster cannot be suspected of 
 pro-Germanism. Yet with his knowledge of 
 the faults and crimes of Germany he believed 
 that a sincere inquirer would find that the pe- 
 culiar guilt of Prussia and her satellite states 
 consisted only in the systematic and wantonly 
 rigorous fashion that she carried out the ac- 
 cepted principles of statecraft and strategy. 
 A thorough analysis would disclose, in other 
 words, that Prussia's crime consisted not in 
 being differently brutal but in being perfectly 
 brutal. Prussianism was simply a mature form 
 of Gallicism or Russianism. The underlying 
 psychology, even the final outcome, was the 
 same. 
 
 In a sense the war created no new conditions, 
 no new problems, no new solutions. The chief 
 function of the war was to open our eyes to 
 conditions and problems that had long existed. 
 Because of the fact that our eyes have indeed 
 to some extent been opened, many earnest peo- 
 ple have deluded themselves into beheving that 
 the conflict was a great blessing — or, at any 
 rate, that it will prove a great blessing in the
 
 The Morass of War 79 
 
 long run. They are justified in their optimism 
 only to the extent that it is true that our short- 
 sighted European society cared about nothing 
 that vitally concerned its existence, and had to 
 be bathed in blood before it could understand 
 the daily necessity for water. 
 
 But they were wrong because the conse- 
 quences of the war are so incompatible with its 
 results and lessons. What advantage is it for 
 more people to know that nations ought not to 
 be suppressed; that our economic and indus- 
 trial life must be reconstructed? Is Germany 
 not enslaved by the peace treaty ? Are millions 
 of people not oppressed by foreign rule? 
 Egypt! India! Ireland! Russia by the Al- 
 lies? Part of Hungary by the Czechs? Part 
 of Russia by the Roumanians? Part of China 
 by the Japanese? 
 
 All these "new" problems only illustrate that 
 the forces which engendered the war have 
 grown stronger; that the purposes which cor- 
 rupted our society and international life are 
 still uppermost in our minds. Is it not signifi- 
 cant that in the French Chamber of Depu- 
 ties the peace treaty was opposed because Ger- 
 many was not disarmed and not sufficiently 
 punished, and because the guarantees were not
 
 80 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 sufficiently strong? A new triple alliance, 
 Great Britain, France, and the United States, 
 is proposed at Versailles — a more immoral 
 weapon than even Bismarck forged in his Aus- 
 trian-German combination. Moltke, Bis- 
 marck's Hindenburg, once said that war pre- 
 vents us from falling into the most degrading 
 materialism, and egotism. Our modern war- 
 makers and peace-makers may speak of this 
 war differently, but they act in the very spirit 
 of Moltke's remark. 
 
 War was never a spring of progress. War, 
 and especially a victorious war, never brought 
 any contribution to the development and hap- 
 piness of human beings. The tears of Jules 
 Favre, who wept on Bismarck's shoulder under 
 the walls of Paris, are forgotten or entirely un- 
 known. But those tears of a devoted repre- 
 sentative of a defeated army were very 
 significant. They were perhaps more danger- 
 ous than the self-satisfaction of the victor. 
 Clemenceau has proved that. He took re- 
 venge. Many tears are now being shed in the 
 defeated countries. But a lost war, a defeat 
 (it must be remembered now that the war is 
 over), is more than an idea in the so-called 
 "defeatist" theory of the Russian opponents of
 
 The Morass of War 81 
 
 the war. When Russia lost the war with Tur- 
 key in 1855 it resulted in the inauguration of 
 new reforms. In 1861 serfdom was abolished. 
 In 1864 a new civil court was established. But 
 when Russia won the war with Turkey in 1876 
 reaction began, and Alexander II was killed. 
 When Russia lost the war with Japan, in 1904, 
 a constitution and a parliament, limited in- 
 deed, were given to the Russian people. But 
 when the Russian armies advanced successfully 
 on the fields of GaHcia in 1915 a reaction began 
 in Russia, and only after the Galician defeat 
 did the Tsar's throne begin to shake, and cause 
 him to make concessions. A year later it was 
 too late. As long as Napoleon the Third 
 fought successfully he could be the second Em- 
 peror. As soon as he was defeated at Sedan 
 the signal of liberation was given in France. 
 Even Bismarck, in 1870, the First Chancellor 
 of the First German Empire, was more liberal 
 than the new democracy of 1919. Bismarck 
 did not interfere with French internal affairs, 
 and France established her Third Repub- 
 lic. The modern parliamentary "democratic" 
 states, on the other hand, have persistently in- 
 terfered with the internal constitution of Rus- 
 sia, even in the face of resistance by popular
 
 82 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 majorities. Austria is unable to do what her 
 constituent assembly decided. She is prohib- 
 ited from uniting with Germany because, prac- 
 tically, the peace treaty established, not self- 
 determination for Austria, but the continental 
 hegemony of France. If this be progress, 
 democratic progress, what is reaction? 
 
 Among the other lessons of the war one in 
 particular is worthy of note — the behavior of 
 the intellectuals. It confronts us with remark- 
 able anomalies which are not solved by the 
 Marxian formula that a man always expresses 
 the psychology of his economic class. With 
 Mikhailovsky and especially Lavrov I believe 
 that the intellectual groups in a nation repre- 
 sent the quintessence of national, social, and 
 human aspirations. At their best the intelli- 
 gentzia are a group of critically thinking indi- 
 viduals whose thought rises above that of any 
 social group or class. The leaders of the Eu- 
 ropean Socialists exemplify this characteristic; 
 for they are mostly not laboring men, and they 
 have for the large part been compelled to turn 
 their backs on the class that economically 
 claimed their allegiance. Lenin is but the lat- 
 est witness to this truth. A noble from Sim- 
 birsk, at one time a rich man, he organized the
 
 The Morass of War 83 
 
 most proletarian revolution in all history. His 
 example might be multiplied. Anatole France, 
 Henri Barbusse, and many Russian revolution- 
 ists of noble descent in one way or another sac- 
 rificed their place in "society" in order to aid 
 Society. 
 
 Nevertheless, if the intellectuals have freed 
 themselves from economic claims, they present 
 another kind of bias which was not allowed for 
 by Marx. The University of Jena in 1915 
 gave a prize for the best thesis on the subject, 
 "Enghsh Cant." The famous French mu- 
 sician. Saint Saens, so hated all the Germans 
 that he vilified Wagner as a "Prussian." Rus- 
 sian professors of philosophy tried to derive 
 the armament of Krupp from the firmament of 
 Kant. If the national and social spirit of a 
 people was reflected anywhere, in any way, it 
 was in the spirit of the leading intellectuals. 
 There was a phenomenon which must give us 
 pause. Was it not strange to see Gustav 
 Herve among the mihtaristic haters of Ger- 
 many ; Scheidemann a member of Kaiser Wil- 
 hehn's cabinet; Emil Vandervelde signing the 
 peace treaty of Versailles ; and the old Russian 
 Plekhanov enthusiastically pro-war? What 
 was the meaning of this?
 
 84 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 Time alone will give us a complete answer 
 to this question, but, at any rate, one point is 
 certain. The Economic Man may be dead, but 
 nationalism is neither dead nor exhausted: it 
 is, on the contrary, the strongest significant so- 
 cial impulse to-day. 
 
 Nationalism has divided the Socialist Inter- 
 national. It has created the patriotism of 
 Scheidemann, of Thomas, of Plekanov, of Ar- 
 thur Henderson. Civil peace is become the 
 motto of the day. We know that selfish na- 
 tionalism as represented by Napoleon was 
 productive of a greater disaster. The Congress 
 of Vienna, which practically closes the period 
 of the French Revolution, with its absolute dis- 
 regard and violation of national principles, 
 opened the way for the diseases and abnormali- 
 ties of our day, and was one of the greatest 
 crimes in all history. 
 
 The Russian Socialist and historian, Karie- 
 yev, represents the general trend of our history 
 in the following schematic manner. We had at 
 the beginning, he says, river culture. Civili- 
 zation was centered near the rivers; the Nile 
 in Egypt, the Tiger and Euphrates in Meso- 
 potamia. That is the childhood of civilization. 
 Afterwards came sea culture. The Phoeni-
 
 The Morass of War 85 
 
 cians opened the way through Gibraltar, and 
 culture began to be concentrated around the 
 shores of the Mediterranean and the Black and 
 North Seas. To-day we are in the oceanic 
 period. Now if this geographical conception 
 be true it should be correlated with psychologi- 
 cal elements of a decisive character. When 
 Napoleon came to an agreement with Alex- 
 ander the First, at Tilsit, concerning Prussia, 
 the latter was almost reduced to an insignifi- 
 cant point on the map of Europe, and was dis- 
 armed. That was an international mistake. It 
 was the birth of the real militaristic system 
 of our day, of universal compulsory conscrip- 
 tion, springing out of the French Revolution, 
 and contributing to the creation of a Prussia 
 of Bismarck and William II. 
 
 That experiment with Prussia could not be 
 repeated on a larger scale without disastrous 
 results. Being in the oceanic state of culture, 
 geographically and in the mechanical state of 
 world civilization spiritually, we could not es- 
 cape a collapse, since the Congress of Vienna, 
 in creating a new map of Europe, had enslaved 
 many of Europe's nations. 
 
 The national movement of Young Deutsch- 
 land, and then the movement for national unity
 
 86 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 of Germany, led by Bismarck, was practically 
 the first big national wave which broke over 
 Europe. International policies, after the Con- 
 gress of Vienna, and later the Versailles peace 
 of 1870, seemed to be policies for disregarding 
 national aspirations and necessities. It seems 
 to me that this war was the ninth wave, the last 
 blow of that spirit. This point became especi- 
 ally clear to me when, early in September, 
 1918, I happened to attend a session of the 
 Austrian Reichsrat. I shall never forget the 
 speeches of the Czecho- Slovak leader, Stanyek, 
 the Polish Social Democrat, Dashinsky, and of 
 those leaders of the Jugo- Slavs, the Ukrain- 
 ians, the Roumanians and the Italians. Dash- 
 insky's speech was a strange combination of 
 terrible despair and undying hope. The bit- 
 terness and suffering of the Poles, oppressed 
 by Russia, Germany, and Austria, were ex- 
 pressed with such fervor, and his heroic faith in 
 Allied democracy was expressed with such con- 
 viction, that the Minister-President, Baron 
 Husarek, could not find adequate words to re- 
 ply. He gave us the impression of being a 
 big confused child who was trying to make his 
 voice heard in a large hall among many people. 
 *'We do not want anything but national free-
 
 The Morass of War 87 
 
 dom," said Stanyek. "Stupid men! They 
 think that we are traitors to our Fatherland 
 and official spies of the Allied countries. We 
 are only in communication with those who stand 
 for freedom through the wireless telegraphy of 
 our brains." 
 
 "The world importance of empires composed 
 of different nations is past," he said to me 
 later. But he did not know — nor was he alone 
 in his faith and his ignorance — that Lloyd 
 George thought differently about Ireland, 
 Egypt and India; that Balfour and Clemen- 
 ceau are either blind men dying with their 
 times, or else psychological geniuses of won- 
 derful perspicacity who realize that national- 
 ism is the last chord that can be elicited from 
 the broken social violin of all Europe, and who 
 choose to die with that final sound in their ears. 
 
 The most difficult question of to-day is how 
 to find again and how to bring into being once 
 more the real spirit of democracy, and how to 
 reconcile that spirit with the desperate reaction 
 of nationalism. At a certain moment nation- 
 alism passes its climax of community solidarity 
 and enters a stage of chauvinism. The Poles 
 have proved this. That stage means the ego- 
 tism of a community asserting itself, which is
 
 88 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 equivalent to personal or family egotism on an 
 enormous scale. We are yet very far from the 
 end of nationalism, when it will remain for the 
 world's conscience and the world's moral spirit 
 to bring into play the cooperation which will 
 solidarize humanity. Even the extreme revo- 
 lutionary movement which had as its banner 
 the maximalist economic conception, could not 
 get rid of the national element ; nay, the latter 
 became one of its main supports. Hungarian 
 communism came into being under the banner 
 of national salvation, although it was called a 
 step further towards social revolution. It was 
 not in vain that Count Karolyi, the bourgeois 
 president of Hungary, was one of its promot- 
 ers, and the Russian Communist revolution be- 
 came solid and strong only when the spirit of 
 national defense, although expressed in terms 
 of social revolution, arose throughout the 
 country. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that in 1812 Na- 
 poleon was defeated, not by the regular Rus- 
 sian armies of General Kutuzov, but by groups 
 of illiterate village peasants without any mili- 
 tary leadership, who were still serfs and slaves. 
 The national impulse was instrumental in Na- 
 poleon's defeat, and that same national impulse
 
 The Morass of War 89 
 
 is now one of the strongest factors in the unity 
 and sohdarity of Central Russia. The bulk 
 of the Russian peasantry is suffering more 
 under the Soviets, because of the blockade, 
 than they suffered under Kerensky, but they 
 feel they have their own destiny in their own 
 hands, and they are strong and united. 
 
 It is difficult to foresee what will be the way 
 for a reconciliation of these two elements, na- 
 tional freedom and international democratic 
 cooperation. This war, like all the wars of the 
 past, and those of the future as well, has only 
 played upon the most sensitive instincts of hu- 
 manity, and has brought about nothing more 
 than a rearrangement of warring nations, with 
 the natural consequences of chauvinism, imper- 
 ialism, and brute force. Thus far humanity, 
 having no national leaders, and having no hope 
 in the new order which has been organized by 
 old men, on old bases, with old materials and 
 old tools — humanity is thus far trying in vain 
 to find its way out. Yet in one nation, because 
 of special conditions, there issued spontan- 
 eously a desperate effort to get rid, first of her 
 own rulers, and second of those representa- 
 tives of her family who were merchandising 
 for their own selfish purposes. The convul-
 
 90 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 sive effort of humanity to clear the path before 
 it is best illustrated by the Russian revolution. 
 Unfortunately the rest of the world remains 
 submerged by the darkmen of old biases and as 
 a result the Russian revolution degenerated 
 in an almost incurable physical and moral 
 tragedy.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE KECOVERY OF REVOLUTION 
 
 The Russian Revolution, at the moment I 
 write, dates back three years. Yet few ob- 
 servers in Western Europe fully sense the 
 significance of that catastrophe. The revolu- 
 tion is still looked upon as a convulsive reaction 
 against that monstrous survival of a darker 
 age — the Tsardom. Historically, a number 
 of facts support this narrow, local interpreta- 
 tion of the revolution. Beyond all doubt the 
 Tsardom was an abnormal political institution. 
 It continued to exercise unabated authority in 
 a period when even Persia had some kind of a 
 parliament, and when the despotism of the 
 Sultan of Turkey was being momentarily 
 threatened by insurgent forces. The colossal 
 integrity of Tsardom in the twentieth century 
 Vas amazing. After the short period of mock 
 constitutionalism which followed the Russo- 
 Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 
 
 91
 
 92 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 1905, Tsardom resumed its obsolescent claims 
 of autocracy with vigorous impudence. Nicho- 
 las II, on succeeding Alexander III to the 
 throne in 1896, had reminded certain represen- 
 tatives of the old Russian zemstvos and village 
 districts (volosty) that the aspirations of lib- 
 eral Russian groups for a constitutional mon- 
 archy were merely "unrealizable dreams." In 
 1907 the Russian Duma duly confirmed that 
 observation by proclaiming Nicholas officially 
 "Tsar and Autocrat of All the Russias." The 
 hypocrisy of constitutional reform needed no 
 further confirmation. The re-elevation of the 
 Tsar by the Duma was the equivalent of the 
 abolition of the Duma by the Tsar. 
 
 For all this the second Russian Revolution 
 did not share the peculiarly national character- 
 istics of the first. I remember the attempted 
 overthrow in 1905. It was a political revolt 
 engineered under the auspices of the Russian 
 intellectuals, by purely Russian methods, with- 
 out aid or influence from the outside. For 
 many reasons this first revolution failed, and 
 when the last spark of it had been extinguished 
 by exile and imprisonment the hope of revolu- 
 tion all but disappeared among the radicals and 
 Socialists of Europe. The idea of revolution
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 93 
 
 remained not so much a living belief as a dead 
 postulate of the class struggle. Russia, ac- 
 cording to the Marxians, was the last country 
 in which the revolution could occur; for here 
 capitalism had not yet completely converted 
 society to the Great Industry, and, according 
 to the determinist doctrine, a revolution which 
 did not evolve out of the economic situation 
 had no elements of success. 
 
 The outburst of the revolutionary spirit in 
 Russia in 1917 left the theoreticians gasping. 
 The Berne International Socialist Bureau, in 
 its first manifesto after the March revolution of 
 1917, begins with a phrase which reveals how 
 strikingly impressed its authors were. "The 
 revolution," cries the manifesto, "still lives!" 
 Such joy was like that which used to greet the 
 birth of a royal child after a marriage that had 
 long been sterile. Theoretical doubts and di- 
 lemmas had been annulled by the event. A 
 new revolution had been born: the spirit of '89 
 and '48 still lived! 
 
 Now, the downfall of the Tsar was a matter 
 of more than purely Russian concern, and it 
 excited worldwide interest. But in spite of the 
 Russian spirit of some of its especial features 
 the revolution itself was a result of interna-
 
 94 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tional political conditions wliich, in a sense, 
 merely focussed themselves in Russia. The 
 mainspring of the Russian Revolution of 1917, 
 in other words, was not national but interna- 
 tional. It was a reaction against the present- 
 day European spirit rather than against the 
 Tsardom. In short, it had a universal political 
 significance, and because of that fact it can- 
 not be considered as an isolated event that took 
 place in a peculiarly remote and backward 
 country. The oppression of Tsardom was an 
 accidental cause of the revolution; the decay 
 of European thought, the repression of vital 
 forces and individuahties, the burden of a 
 senseless war, were the real, the ultimate, and 
 the efficient causes of the Russian Revolution. 
 Let us pause here for a moment to examine the 
 particular conditions upon which these remoter 
 causes operated. 
 
 One must remember, first of all, that Russia 
 was closely linked — because of the war — with 
 the political aspirations of Western Europe. 
 The Russian allies, England and France, and 
 especially the former, were hugely disap- 
 pointed in Russian Tsardom. They were op- 
 posed to it, not because it was an iniquitous 
 political system, but because it had proved, as
 
 Tlie Recovery of Revolution 95 
 
 a military organization, to be lamentably weak. 
 The decade that had elapsed between the 
 Russo-Japanese War and the Great War had 
 contributed nothing to the efficiency of Tsar- 
 dom as a war-machine. War, indeed, is a 
 typically autocratic enterprise, but the last war 
 proved that the spirit of strenuous popular 
 combat needed the illusions of democratic 
 forms and conventions, with convincing politi- 
 cal slogans, in order to awaken the latent 
 energies of the industrial and military popula- 
 tion. Therein lay the weakness of the Russian 
 autocracy. They feared greatly that popular 
 slogans might come to have some real meaning 
 to the Russian people. The autocracy, on one 
 hand, was too reserved, and on the other hand 
 too rigorously committed to its forms, to en- 
 force its autocratic power to the full. The 
 very lock of formal democracy in Russia weak- 
 ened the possibility of creating that real and 
 efficient autocracy under which the "liberal" 
 countries of Western Europe operated. The 
 short-sighted selfishness of the Russian autoc- 
 racy caused great concern in the British For- 
 eign Office; for Russia was an apparently 
 inexhaustible source of "cannon-fodder" whose 
 ten million men under arms needed only ade-
 
 96 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 quate equipment and generalship to roll a tidal 
 wave of victory over the Central Empires. 
 England tried accordingly, among the moder- 
 ate liberals in Russian society, to unmask the 
 selfish politics of the Tsar. Sir George 
 Buchanan, the British Ambassador in Petro- 
 grad, had much to do with this campaign, and 
 through such leaders as Milyukov he made a 
 deep breach in the ranks of the ruling classes 
 by denouncing either the pro-Germanism of 
 the Court or the perverser crimes of politics 
 accomplished with the influence and under the 
 cooperation of the notorious "Saint" Rasputin. 
 Thus the official forces of Russian nationalism 
 were weakened. It needed only a general 
 European collapse, about which the revolution- 
 ary Russian leaders, in all corners of Europe, 
 were well informed to open the way for a 
 popular movement of far-reaching import- 
 ance. 
 
 A building may appear big and strong and 
 imposing, but once the first stone is removed 
 from its foundation its ultimate destruction is 
 only a matter of time. Without another act 
 from the outside the entire edifice will totter 
 and fall. That was the case with Russian 
 Tsardom. England, no doubt, failed to see
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 97 
 
 that her removal of a single stone would result 
 in the complete dilapidation of the structure 
 of Russian society, but that is precisely what 
 happened. Her support of Denikin and Kol- 
 chak may be characterized as attempts to re- 
 trieve that which from the reactionary political 
 point of view of the Foreign Office must have 
 seemed a gigantic error in gauging social 
 stresses and strains. 
 
 The ground for the revolution had been 
 cleared, but it was still a question as to what 
 group should prepare the plans for a new 
 structure of society. The true revolutionary 
 elements did not hold the field alone, nor were 
 they the only group that sought to profit by 
 the collapse of Tsardom. There were those 
 who wished to keep the essentials of the old 
 order by bolstering it up with constitutional 
 sanctions and supports. For a time Russian 
 parliamentarianism came to the front, repre- 
 sented by the Cadets, and along with these were 
 the Russian patriots, represented by the ex- 
 treme right. They could not, however, retain 
 power for any length of time — and for a simple 
 reason. They had but two watchwords : "Na- 
 tional Defense," and "Unity with Civilized 
 Europe." Neither of these was calculated to
 
 98 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 do anything except increase popular distrust. 
 What was really the background of national 
 consciousness and national defense? It was 
 the old formula that had been adopted by the 
 Tsar, developed by the Tsar, and abused by 
 the Tsar. Great as was the peril of the Ger- 
 man invasion, it was a weakness to fight it with 
 a slogan extracted from the dictionary of the 
 ancient regime. Unity with Europe was just 
 as incompatible with a revolutionary psychol- 
 ogy. What did it really mean? I recall a 
 novel, entitled "L'Or," by the French writer, 
 Paul Victor. In that book is an excellent de- 
 scription of the Tsar's visit to Paris in 1897. 
 The enthusiastic welcome given this "splendid 
 representative of a splendid people" could not 
 be forgotten by Russia, the suppressed. A 
 change of scene and a lengthening of years 
 brought out the irony of this tribute. The 
 triumphant visits of President Loubet and 
 President Poincare to Petrograd cast a light 
 upon the values and necessities of European 
 imity. Strikes were taking place in July, 
 1914, at Petrograd on the occasion of Poin- 
 care's visit. The political situation was acute. 
 Yet the censorship suspended communications 
 about the strikes and the newspapers dealt only
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 99 
 
 with the wonderful style of the speeches made 
 by the French president, upon drinking to the 
 health of the Tsar. A few weeks later the war 
 broke out. For diplomats, for experts in in- 
 ternational affairs, the war meant a welding of 
 the Franco-Russian alliance, conceived and 
 organized by Tsar Alexander III. That was 
 what "European unity" meant, for example, 
 to Sazonov. For the masses who had tasted 
 the first sip of freedom European unity meant 
 the continuance of a regime that would be 
 friendly to the Tsar and his rule. Were Rus- 
 sia thus united to Europe, the Russian intel- 
 lectuals saw, the active sympathy of other 
 European groups could no longer be counted 
 upon in the movement for liberation. 
 
 Now, the spirit of international radicalism 
 has always been the spirit of the Russian Revo- 
 lution : it has been so from the very beginning. 
 The Russian revolutionist was afraid of per- 
 petuating unity in war because he wished to 
 preserve unity in the battle for freedom. This 
 spirit was not an invention of Lenin and 
 Trotzky. Three days after the overthrow of 
 the Tsar, on March 16, 1917, the first Russian 
 Petrograd Soviet adopted a resolution in favor 
 of a democratic peace which should be sup-
 
 100 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 ported and enforced, not by the governments 
 of Europe, but by the working men. That 
 most honest Sociahst and patriot, Kerensky, al- 
 ways a consistent anti-Bolshevist, the soul of 
 the first period of the Russian Revolution, 
 never made a speech of any kind without men- 
 tioning the European proletariat masses — 
 never the European diplomats. The slightest 
 betrayal of sympathy toward the governments 
 of Europe was enough to precipitate a new 
 revolution. That is why the conservative par- 
 ties so quickly were thrust into the background. 
 Milyukov, as Minister of Foreign Affairs, in a 
 fatal note dated March 4, 1917, informed the 
 Allies that Russia remained almost uncondi- 
 tionally with them. That note brought about 
 the first crisis of the Provisional Government. 
 As a result seven Socialists were given port- 
 folios. The unpopularity of war and reaction 
 was evident. 
 
 Thus we see that from the very beginning 
 the Russian Revolution was not an independ- 
 ent process of a purely Russian character. It 
 was rather a reaction to international ambi- 
 tions. It was not Lenin or Trotzky who made 
 the Russian problem a factor in international 
 calculations. They simply made it more evi-
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 101 
 
 dent, more acute, more consistent, more dif- 
 ficult to escape. 
 
 I have noted that the element which was 
 primarily instrumental in the process of the 
 revolution was the element of distrust. It was 
 a distrust both of Europe and of those Russian 
 political groups that claimed to represent Eu- 
 ropean democracy. The character of the revo- 
 lution became more clear-cut and positive when 
 the exiled revolutionists of the old regime 
 poured back into the country. It is a political 
 superstition to believe that men like Chernov, 
 Lenin, and Trotzky were conscious, and even 
 official, pro-Germans as has been so frequently 
 alleged. Potentially, a large part of the Rus- 
 sian population was disaffected ; that is to say, 
 it leaned toward anti-war, anti-European, and 
 anti-imperialist doctrines. The Bolshevik lead- 
 ers did not create this disaffection. It already 
 
 existed, and from the beginning it undermined 
 the authority of such an Anglophile as Milyu- 
 kov. Kerensky himself, with his desperate 
 patriotism and his '93 nationalism, was no man 
 to combat this deep-seated antipathy to Europe 
 and the War. The extremist chiefs, on the 
 other hand, brought back with them an old 
 revolutionary record and a profound knowl-
 
 102 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 edge of Europe. They expressed in clear 
 words the living spirit of the people. Their 
 bitterness was a result of their experiences: it 
 was no moody psychological reaction. Inspired 
 by these leaders the popular confidence in the 
 revolution burned anew. 
 
 I do not intend to go exhaustively into the 
 diplomatic blunders and international mistakes 
 committed in the capitals of Europe in deal- 
 ing with the Russian Revolution, since it would 
 be idle to give more instances of the inadequacy 
 of the old diplomats of the old school, dealing 
 with the same old words, to new people about 
 new events. The Russian Revolution was 
 something quite new, and the accredited rep- 
 resentatives of the associated powers tried to 
 convince the representatives of the new Russia 
 with the same words and the same smiles which 
 they had addressed some few weeks before to 
 the high personalities at Tsarskoye Selo. Per- 
 haps, from the standpoint of the traditions of 
 "civilized" diplomacy, it is proper to turn a 
 smiling face to the Tsarina returning from an 
 appointment with the ignorant monk Ras- 
 putin, and to Kerensky after he had a confer- 
 ence with the Council of Workmen and 
 Soldiers ; but from the standpoint of a revolu-
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 103 
 
 tion the act would be merely a polite conde- 
 scension. 
 
 What is more interesting is to note the 
 European elements in the Russian Revolution. 
 I must first of all explain that Russian Tsar- 
 dom, although an Asiatic survival, employed 
 almost all the European political tools and 
 slogans. Therefore the anti-national, anti- 
 social, and almost personal policy of the Tsars 
 was always covered by the familiar catchwords, 
 "community" and "patriotism." As I have 
 pointed out before, patriotism was one of the 
 mainsprings in the general policy of Western 
 Europe. But in Russia the word acquired an 
 entirely different meaning. The benevolent 
 absolutists of the eighteenth century did not 
 pretend, at least officially, to be patriots. They 
 were only the more educated, absolutist, 
 "fathers" of their "children," the people: 
 Their loyalty clung not to their country but to 
 their class. The French Revolution accord- 
 ingly was born and conducted under the tri- 
 color flag of French patriotism, as opposed to 
 the white flag of the Bourbons and nobles. 
 French soldiers killed army officers because the 
 latter were traitors to their countrv, anti- 
 patriots. A hundred and twenty years of
 
 104 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 European life, however, had changed the old 
 ideas. Patriotism as a motive for revolution 
 disappeared because it was misused by Napo- 
 leon and Bismarck, by Treitschke and by the 
 Tsars. The Russian word patriotism had al- 
 ways been associated with the Tsar's party, 
 with pogrom unions, and with the reactionary 
 clergy. The downfall of the Tsar was the 
 downfall of official patriotism. Therefore the 
 partisans of national defense, from the left to 
 the right, were bound to be misunderstood by 
 the people. The former had their own patriotic 
 ideas of traditional European liberalism, 
 whereas the people could not get rid of the 
 strange association of patriotism with selfish 
 and greedy conservatism. 
 
 Here it is worth while to make one point 
 clear. Kerensky was not guilty of merely a 
 tactical blunder. He was really persuaded 
 that a revolutionary nationalism, somewhat 
 akin to the revolutionary nationalism of France 
 in 1793-1796, would be the most valuable aid 
 in the development of Russian freedom. In 
 this respect he trusted more to his tempera- 
 ment and idealistic aspirations than to an in- 
 sight into the real state of facts and the mind 
 of the people. He did not notice or realize
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 105 
 
 that in order to carry out his principles he had 
 to deal, not with a nation which was self-con- 
 scious and would follow a national hero, but 
 with a nervous, tired mass whose enthusiasm 
 was a result of the unexpected and glorious 
 new freedom. The healthy national instincts 
 of the mass were not affected by Kerensky be- 
 cause they had been weakened by the long te- 
 dium of warfare. 
 
 During the Kerensky period of the revolu- 
 tion we passed through a time when the people 
 were simply a plain crowd, guided or led by an 
 idealist whose ideas were strange to the crowd 
 itself. Anyone with a cahn mind, whether he 
 was an opponent or a partisan of Kerensky, 
 could not help seeing that a reaction, and a 
 disastrous reaction, was inevitable. As long as 
 Napoleon guided his armies under the banner 
 of liberty and patriotism, which was the real 
 standard of the French Revolution, he could 
 succeed; but as soon as these expressions be- 
 came merely political, as soon as the army 
 failed to recognize them as real issues. Na- 
 poleon was morally defeated. Kerensky was 
 much weaker and less conspicuous than the 
 great French soldier and Emperor; and Keren- 
 sky was neither a dictator, nor a man of power.
 
 106 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 He is perhaps the best illustration bf the pure 
 Russian type of activity and idealism. Keren- 
 sky believed. His faith was naive, almost 
 religious. He believed that a people cannot 
 misunderstand their own great needs, that out 
 of the depths of the masses arises always the 
 whole spirit of truth and justice. He feared 
 from the very beginning that the masses might 
 be corrupted, and all his policy was directed 
 toward moral education, and laissez faire laissez 
 passer. As early as April, 1917, in the first 
 month of the revolution, addressing the first 
 Congress of Russian peasants, he said, in the 
 most emphatic and forceful way: "You, com- 
 rades, must now show whether you are a people 
 of strength and freedom, or only a mass of 
 revolting slaves." He believed that he could 
 feel the pulse and heart of the people, and that 
 they would never betray their own future. It 
 seemed to him that it would be sufficient if the 
 people were but to get rid of their oppressor, 
 and that any constraint after this would be un- 
 necessary. He was a real idealist, of almost 
 Christian resignation, strangely combined with 
 a tendency to assume a moral dictatorship. I 
 remember a tragic moment at the time of the 
 Moscow National Congress in August, 1917,
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 107 
 
 when, in his opening speech, after describing 
 the general desperate conditions both inter- 
 nally and at the front, he went on to say that 
 the Provisional Government had found it 
 necessary to reestablish capital punishment at 
 the front. Enthusiastic applause from the 
 Right greeted the statement. Stamping his 
 foot, and with threatening, clenched fist he 
 interrupted the applause with a loud, almost 
 hysterical cry of "Silence ! Silence ! You have 
 no right to applaud at a moment when we are 
 dealing with life and death, the right of which 
 does not belong to us. It is terrible that at a 
 time of such stress and despair we are com- 
 pelled to use such violence. That is our shame, 
 but never our pride." 
 
 Had Kerensky been free from the pernicious 
 reactionary influences which were brought to 
 bear upon him, he would never have under- 
 taken any act in violation of the idealistic spirit 
 of the revolution. It is impossible, it would 
 seem, to live and to carry out humane prin- 
 ciples in a world debauched by violence. Vio- 
 lent methods are pure European methods ; they 
 imply a morbid idea of justice, a justice real- 
 ized by discipline or constraint. They are re- 
 pugnant to the Russian idealist. Alexander
 
 108 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 Hertzen observed with saddened conviction in 
 one of his works : "Pereat mundus -fiat justitia? 
 What a stupid idea ! I do not want any justice 
 which is bought by the sacrifice of the world. 
 What is the use of any justice which exists all 
 alone, when the world is perishing? I do not 
 want any justice, any abstract justice, which 
 flourishes abstractly on the gravestones of 
 humanity." And that spirit expressed the 
 beauty, the excellence, and the weakness of 
 Kerensky. 
 
 Two types of political thought and principle 
 were brought into Russia from abroad. The 
 first, the liberalism of the European, and es- 
 pecially the English mind, as represented by 
 Milyukov and his party ; and the second, the tra- 
 ditional orthodox Socialism, mostly influenced 
 by the German school. The old Russian lib- 
 erals from the first day of the revolution 
 showed that they were a mentally backward 
 group. They had appeared to be advanced 
 only so long as such a mediaeval survival as 
 Tsardom existed ; but when they had to face a 
 new twentieth-century problem they had 
 only an eighteenth-century solution to oflFer. 
 ISTursed on European literature, in European 
 schools of political thought, and fed with ideas
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 109 
 
 of English liberalism — which seemed to them 
 to be the ultima ratio of a people's life — they 
 represented from the very first, and still repre- 
 sent, the European ideals of force, of domina- 
 tion by the state, of the imposed mechanical 
 discipline of predominant government. They 
 suffered from an idee pee from the first day of 
 the revolution; the idea embodied in the words 
 Power, Discipline. They did not judge Ke- 
 rensky's plans or revolutionary ideals from the 
 standpoint of new values, nor did they seek 
 new methods in order to carry them out. They 
 had their old party prescriptions ready to hand. 
 A parliamentary state must guide people in a 
 certain direction by the old prescribed means. 
 The state machine must avail itself of the old 
 resources of constraint and carry out a fixed 
 program of "law and order." 
 
 The spirit embodied in Kerensky was, I say,' 
 opposed to these European policies. The fu- 
 ture historian may, perhaps, be amazed to find 
 in the records and documents concerning the 
 first days of the Russian Revolution the fol- 
 lowing fact, significant of that first outburst 
 of generous impulse. When Zukomlinoff , the 
 erstwhile Minister of War, was arrested by the 
 guard and brought to the palace of Taurida,
 
 IIQ The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 he narrowly escaped being lynched by the mass 
 of soldiers and workmen in the Catherine Hall 
 of the palace, for he was known as a traitor 
 and a selfish politician who had played a sin- 
 ister part in the military defeat of Russia. 
 When the crowd recognized him their anger 
 against him rose to fury. As always, unex- 
 pectedly, the indefatigable Kerensky emerged 
 from the throng. "We have been fighting all 
 our lives for the abolition of violence!" he ex- 
 claimed. "Stop! No blood!" And the mob 
 stopped. Some of the men protested. They 
 saw the crosses of distinction on the breast of 
 the^jlM Tsarist and the epaulets of a general on 
 his s3ioulders, and wanted to pull them off. 
 It was a dramatic moment, and the cry to 
 lynch him broke out. Kerensky's strong voice 
 rang out again. "He will do it himself. You 
 have no right to kill. He is an unarmed 
 enemy, and he is in our hands." He took a 
 penknife out of his pocket and handed it to 
 the general, who slowly and with trembling 
 hands, cut off all the decorations that had been 
 given him by the Tsar. Gratified, the crowd 
 cheered. Its human heart had remained whole 
 and clean. 
 
 In the meantime a session of the Petrograd
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 111 
 
 Council of Workmen and Soldiers was taking 
 place in one of the adjoining rooms, and a radi- 
 cal leader of the first revolutionary days, 
 afterwards a Bolshevik, Styeklov, was counsel- 
 ling from the platform of the Soviet, the exe- 
 cution of the Tsar — who was being brought to 
 Petrograd under guard. Again he rose heroic- 
 ally to the situation and lifted high the banner 
 of humanity. "No blood!" he pleaded ear- 
 nestly. "We are the victors to-day and we 
 must show to those we have conquered by the 
 powerful will of a liberated people, that we 
 are more human than they were; that we do 
 not need any revenge; that we do not even 
 want to fight people who are lost as a force 
 once and forever." 
 
 Kerensky carried the meeting and the Tsar 
 was not executed. The day following, it was 
 decreed, by the' same Kerensky, the first Revo- 
 lutionary JNIinister of Justice, that capital 
 punishment should be abolished. 
 
 And yet these methods of Kerensky were 
 sneezed at as "phrases! words!" His ideals 
 and tactics came to be known, in derogatory 
 fashion, as "Kerenschina" or "Kerenskyisms." 
 
 The Cadet party was ready to sacrifice its 
 political reputation, and even the country it-
 
 112 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 self, in order to carry out the war policy 
 adopted by our "civilized" western European 
 Allies. With the slogans "patriotism" and 
 "national defense" they endeavored to under- 
 mine the real revolutionary unity which existed 
 in Russia, and to use their own methods in- 
 stead. Both in their ideals and in their be- 
 havior the liberal Russian bourgeoisie were the 
 least patriotic, the least national, and the most 
 doctrinaire section of the Russian people. In 
 their blindness and pedantic devotion to the 
 AlHed democracy they undermined, whenever 
 it was possible, the Provisional Government, 
 and they threw up every obstacle against regu- 
 uar development of the Russian Revolution. 
 In the last days of June, 1917, when the of- 
 fensive, which Kerensky was compelled to 
 undertake by the Allies and by the Cadets, 
 was making a desperate effort at the front 
 against Germany, all the Socialist members of 
 the government had left Petrograd. Keren- 
 sky was on the western front, at Minsk : Scobe- 
 liev, the Minister of Labor, Lebediev, the 
 Minister of the Navj^ and I myself were at 
 the northwestern front, at Dvinsk; the Social 
 Democrat Tseretelli and Necrasov were in 
 Kief, in communication with the Ukrainian
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 113 
 
 representatives. It was a moment when the 
 national aspirations of Ukrainia had grown, 
 and taking into consideration the military sit- 
 uation and the significance of Ukrainia as the 
 next rear to the southwestern front, the Pro- 
 visional Government had come to an im- 
 mediate agreement with the Ukrainians. The 
 members of the Cadet party alone remained in 
 Petrogi-ad. They had to assume the responsi- 
 bility for the organic work of the state at that 
 time. Petrograd was in a disturbed state. 
 The workers were dissatisfied with the policy 
 of the Cadet members of the government dur- 
 ing the first months of the revolution. At the 
 very height of this national crisis we received a 
 secret dispatch from Petrograd that the mem- 
 bers of the Cadet party had resigned. Their 
 official excuse was that the moment was too 
 serious and complicated, and they deemed it 
 their duty to give up their places to those who 
 wanted them. 
 
 The Socialist Minister of Agriculture, Cher- 
 nov, was right when he said, "The Cadets did 
 not resign. They deserted." The men who 
 claimed to have a monopoly on patriotism and 
 noble nationalism found it best to leave the 
 governmental machine at a moment when tlieir
 
 114 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 services were most needed. They chose to fol- 
 low the old principle — let the world perish pro- 
 vided an abstract, doctrinaire justice may- 
 reign. 
 
 This move practically cleared the way, for 
 the first time, for the rule of the Soviets. The 
 Soviet leaders of Petrograd remained in their 
 places during this critical period and tried to 
 coordinate their work with the advices re- 
 ceived by wire from the different members of 
 the government outside Petrograd, who had 
 
 not deserted. 
 
 Milyukov and Chingarov were the real rep- 
 resentatives of the doctrine of pure force in 
 statesmanship. Without force they could not 
 conceive the idea of community — it was the 
 sine qua nan of political existence. The weak- 
 ness of their "strong-arm" doctrine came to 
 light in the August days of Korniloff's rebel- 
 lion. Immediately after the receipt of the 
 news of Korniloff's pronunciamento, the Cadet 
 members of the government, Yurenov, Minis- 
 ter of Raih-oads, Oldenburg, Minister of Edu- 
 cation, and the others resigned; their official 
 reason being "The moment is too serious, and 
 we deem it our duty to permit Kerensky to 
 organize a government." Again the Russian
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 115 
 
 bourgeois liberals tried to escape from the re- 
 sponsibility for maintaining the Russian Revo- 
 lution. 
 
 It is interesting to compare the attitude of 
 the Bolshevik party at that time. Kerensky 
 was most cordially hated by all of them. The 
 Provisional Government was to them an odious 
 organization. Trotzky, Kameneff and Luna- 
 charsky never lost an opportunity to castigate 
 Kerensky at every turn. They resented his 
 intransigeant attitude towards the maximalist 
 tendencies of the Bolsheviki. I remember one 
 night in the Winter Palace, when Kerensky 
 was alone, without friends or advisers. The 
 Socialist members of the government were 
 coming and going to and from conferences with 
 their Central Committee. The deserting 
 Cadets had altogether disappeared from the 
 scene. Kerensky went and returned from the 
 palace to the headquarters of the General 
 Staff almost every few minutes. Suddenly 
 the shriek of a siren came from the harbor. 
 We had heard about an hour before this that 
 the Bolsheviki cruiser the Aurora from Kron- 
 stadt, on which it was rumored Lenin was 
 hiding, was on its way to Petrograd. Evi- 
 dently the Aurora had arrived, and we were
 
 116 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 now faced hy the possibility that the govern- 
 ment would be assailed from both sides, the 
 reaction of the Allies and the Cadets repre- 
 sented by Korniloif, and the Bolsheviki now 
 arriving on the Aurora. I was called down- 
 stairs. Two sailors from the cruiser, serious, 
 grave, stern, and yet nervously energetic, asked 
 to see Kerensky. 
 
 "Perhaps I can help you, comrades. Keren- 
 sky is at the headquarters of the General 
 Staff." 
 
 "We brought this resolution," said one of 
 them, and he handed me a paper with the seal 
 of the steamer committee of the cruiser Aurora, 
 
 I read: "Resolved to give the utmost sup- 
 port to Comrade Kerensky and to the Pro- 
 visional Government for the definite fight 
 against reaction and for the saving of the revo- 
 lution." 
 
 I thanked them and called Minister Scobe- 
 liev, who welcomed them. Ten minutes later 
 the guard of the Winter Palace was replaced 
 by men from the Aurora. We had been 
 through a paradoxical and dramatic experi- 
 ence. Prepared for an uprising we had found 
 a radical Bolshevik crowd ready to defend to 
 the last drop of blood Kerensky and the revo-
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 117 
 
 lution; while the "real representatives of 
 democracy and Russian patriotism" had de- 
 serted and were at that instant conferring with 
 the English Ambassador, Sir George Bucha- 
 nan, and the central committee of the Cadet 
 Party! We learned about this conference 
 from one of the members of the Foreign Of- 
 fice, at four o'clock that same morning. 
 
 Looking back now, at the great and the 
 minute features of this first period of political 
 struggle of the revolution, I am compelled to 
 recognize the strange fact, that the bearers of 
 the national flag were the most anti-national 
 group, whereas the extreme internationalists, 
 unconsciously perhaps, represented the real 
 spirit of national and revolutionary unity when 
 it was most needed. At that time I was a 
 political enemy of the Bolsheviki, as I am now 
 a philosophical one. I felt (as I feel now) 
 that they were right in so far as they did not 
 accept the formulas of the Russian bourgeoisie 
 — the aspirations of European capitalism. The 
 Russian bourgeoisie was the weakest class in 
 Russia, and the least organized, but they were 
 pursuing the methods of their well-organized 
 European colleagues. They could not imagine 
 a state without violence, without capital pun-
 
 118 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 ishment, without force, without all these well- 
 known elements of European civilization. The 
 weakness of Kerensky's regime lay in his in- 
 ability to agree with either the Cadet theory 
 of force or with the Bolshevist extremism. He 
 remained alone, as far as coalition with the 
 bourgeoisie was concerned, and the other wing 
 of the Russian Revolution, the non-Bolshevist 
 Socialists, were too deeply impregnated with 
 European methods to be of assistance. Our 
 leaders, like MartofiP, Tscheidze, and others, 
 despite all their philosophic training and 
 knowledge did not go further than their Eu- 
 ropean teachers. They were real Socialists, 
 doctrinaires, who thought in formulas, in ab- 
 stractions, in principles, but not in terms of 
 real conditions and probabilities. They held 
 fast to the old idea of a mechanical organiza- 
 tion of the masses. Given the masses, they 
 thought, and certain old slogans, they would 
 be able to lead the mass alwaj^s, and to carry 
 out their program. According to the Marxian 
 creed they asserted that the revolution was a 
 bourgeois revolution, a capitalistic revolution; 
 that we were not sufficiently advanced for any 
 other kind of a revolution; and that there- 
 fore the bourgeoisie had to continue the revo-
 
 The Recovery of E evolution 119 
 
 lution, and to control the state, and that it was 
 our mission and province to criticize. This 
 abstract formula led them to renounce any par- 
 ticipation in the government or in any social 
 experiment which differed from the old pre- 
 scribed requirements for a bourgeois capital- 
 istic revolution. They were thus called upon 
 to face, very soon, and for the first time in 
 Europe, a most unfortunate state of affairs. 
 The masses, organized only for the sake of 
 organization; the masses, brought together 
 only for criticism and not for governmental 
 work, soon left them. Thus the non-Bolshevik 
 Socialists lost their authority and influence, 
 and the people remained alone, without lead- 
 ership, transformed into a crowd with only one 
 feeling — discouragement. Looking back now 
 at that period of the Russian Revolution it 
 becomes clear to me that the Bolsheviki did not 
 seize power. They accepted it. They ac- 
 cepted it at a time when authority no longer 
 resided in Russia either in a government or 
 in a leader. The revolution of October, 1917, 
 cannot, it seems to me, be called a revolution. 
 It was a spontaneous renewal of power 
 through a new form of social organization. 
 Thus Bolshevism came, partly as the logical
 
 120 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 result of the Russian Revolution, and partly as 
 the outcome of importing European ideals and 
 principles. When Bolshevism is spoken of 
 to-day as a system it is the European element 
 that is referred to. What does Bolshevism 
 mean in common parlance? How is the word 
 assayed by journalists and diplomats? Three 
 essential characteristics seem to stand out in 
 any popular discussion of the phenomenon. 
 First, Bolshevism is a denial of old constitu- 
 tional formulas. Second, it is a violation of 
 old liberal rights. And third, it is the repudia- 
 tion of diplomatic promises and international 
 agreements. Of course Bolshevism, in com- 
 mon judgment, means many other wicked and 
 monstrous things, but these three features 
 dominate all others. Let us accept this char- 
 acterization for the moment without inquiring 
 how adequately it describes the government of 
 Soviet Russia, and then let us see who are the 
 foremost exponents of the Bolshevist system 
 in Europe. 
 
 When the German Chancellor declared in 
 the German Reichstag that the agreement as 
 to the neutrality of Belgium was only a scrap 
 of paper, was he a Bolshevik or not? When 
 Franz Joseph Second sent the ultimatum to
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 121 
 
 Serbia and declared war in spite of the satis- 
 faction Serbia was willing to give, was he a 
 Bolshevik or not? When the German generals 
 suppressed any opposition on the part of the 
 civil population of Belgium and Von Buelow 
 and Bissingen acted in terroristic fashion, was 
 it not the "Bolshevist" spirit of modern Eu- 
 rope, which knows only the right of force and 
 recognizes no obligations attached to right that 
 feared them? Wlien Russian soldiers in 
 France, free soldiers of the Russian Revolu- 
 tion, wanted to celebrate their own freedom, 
 and many of them were shot by order of the 
 French General Staff — was that Bolshevism 
 
 or not? When Russian soldiers who did not 
 want to go to Denikin or to Kolchak to take 
 Moscow were put on a French steamer at 
 Marseilles and were told that they were being 
 sent home, and afterwards, far out at sea were 
 told that they were destined for Vladivostok, 
 Novorosisk, and Archangel — (and these men 
 are now working as slaves in French colonies 
 in Africa because they resisted and protested) 
 — ^was that Bolshevism or not? That was the 
 rule imposed on Russian citizens by a foreign 
 power, because forsooth, they dared to have 
 ideas of their own. Was that Bolshevism?
 
 122 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 And when, after the downfall of Kerensky, 
 the English and French governments confis- 
 cated all the funds of the Russian embassies, 
 was that less Bolshevist than the reported raids 
 on the French and English embassies in Pet- 
 rograd? 
 
 As far as methods and system are concerned 
 we have to confess that the ferocious spirit 
 of militarist Europe is in no sense different 
 from the methods and system ascribed to Bol- 
 shevism by its most bitter opponents. The 
 Russian radicals who came into power after 
 the downfall of the Russo-European doctrin- 
 aires and the Russo-European hypocritical 
 democracy, had to face a gigantic problem of 
 state policy. Kerensky's example of naive 
 credulity and idealistic faith had sho^vn that 
 it was impossible to work and carry out any 
 principle in Europe without concrete real 
 force, the only difference being that Lenin, 
 the world ideahst and almost religious theoreti- 
 cian of Socialism, was ready to adopt a method 
 imposed upon him by the rest of the world. 
 He alone was consistent. He did not attack. 
 He was assailed. Although represented as a 
 promoter of violence, Lenin simply followed 
 the only course which remained for the Rus-
 
 The Recovery of Revolution 123 
 
 sian Revolution. Kerensky saw that he was 
 undermined by the doctrine of state force. He 
 was unable to use these elements against his 
 enemies. Lenin understood, and bowed to the 
 inevitable. 
 
 We need not go so far back as the Robes- 
 pierre period of the French Revolution, or to 
 the events of 1871. We have only to look 
 about us and to analyze the state system of 
 modern Europe, and we shall see that there is 
 no difference in principle and in methods be- 
 tween parliamentary England and France or 
 old Germany and the first period of the Bol- 
 shevist government. JNIodern Europe did not 
 want to deal with the Russian Revolution. 
 Modern Europe, through the unorganized 
 Russian bourgeoisie, through the organized 
 Alliance of the Entente, through the politics 
 of orthodox Socialism, has compelled revolu- 
 tionary Russia to follow the methods of a dic- 
 tatorship, having overthrown the pure Russian 
 impetus toward governing by moral authority 
 as Kerensky naively hoped to do. 
 
 It was not Lenin who took the power away 
 from the Russian government in order to pos- 
 sess it himself. It was modern Europe that, 
 as a new Machiavelli, or as an old JNIachia-
 
 124 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 velli in a new form, gave this power to Lenin, 
 and that now resents and fights against his 
 possession of it. The opposition of Europe to 
 Soviet Russia is, in other words, nothing less 
 than an attack upon its own most cherished 
 principles. Europe fights against its shadow, 
 and beholding its shadow — is afraid!
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 REVOLUTIONARY CONTRADICTIONS 
 
 I SHALL deal later with Bolshevism, or 
 rather Sovietism, as an idea. Thus far I have 
 dealt only with the methods by which it was 
 brought to expression in thought and act in 
 the various European countries — the French 
 method in Petrograd, the English in Moscow. 
 The Russian Revolution as a whole, and espe- 
 cially its last period, was less a consistent re- 
 action against the general spirit of modern 
 Europe than an involuntary adoption of the 
 methods of modern Europe, methods based on 
 the principle — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a 
 tooth, which Europe has followed in a manner 
 which Machiavelli himself could not improve. 
 Still, it is of importance to understand clearly 
 that the Russian Revolution was possible be- 
 cause the large masses of the people were not 
 nationalistic during the war. Under war con- 
 ditions nationalism could not bring about a 
 
 125
 
 126 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 revolution: The necessity for a united front 
 made any political crisis impossible. With the 
 enemy at hand nationalist feeling develops into 
 chauvinism. That is why the German Revolu- 
 tion was so different from the Russian. No 
 genuine revolution, no renaissance of the spirit, 
 no renewal of social aspirations, no fructifica- 
 tion of new ideas — took place in Germany for 
 its fiercely nationalistic tendencies had never 
 been weakened. Only a couple of weeks before 
 Kaiser Wilhelm left Germany, Schiedemann 
 had become a member of his cabinet. A coali- 
 tion between the bourgeoisie and the Socialists, 
 not only in Parliament but in the administra- 
 tion, was completed on the very eve of the 
 imperial downfall. 
 
 The leading political forces in Germany, in 
 other words, were far from being moved by 
 revolutionary ideas. Being Socialists and 
 therefore Republicans, they could not, facing 
 a national collapse, decide upon a revolution. 
 The situation recalls to my mind an episode in 
 April, 1917, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. A 
 number of German prisoners had arranged for 
 a meeting of Germans in this town to congratu- 
 late the Russians on their revolution. The old 
 Russian Social Democrat leader, I. Ramish-
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 127 
 
 viliy, later the leader of the Georgian govern- 
 ment, addressed this meeting, and asked why 
 the same German prisoners, when they were 
 on the other side of the trench wires, had been 
 willing to fight since they were such devoted 
 friends to Russia. Why had they not, at the 
 very beginning of the war, protested against 
 the Kaiser? It would have been, then, a sig- 
 nal for a revolution against the war. 
 
 A German captain answered, amid cheers 
 from his fellow countrymen and general laugh- 
 ter from the Russians: "Because we were first 
 of all Germans." 
 
 Scheidemann, realizing at that time that his 
 country was defeated politically, that the idea 
 of conquest was dead, and that a real revolu- 
 tion would rouse the rest of the world to 
 aggression — Scheidemann accepted a portfolio 
 in Kaiser Wilhelm's cabinet, and, like this 
 German captain, he was first of all a Ger- 
 man. 
 
 I remember those days in Germany well, 
 and I cannot resist the conviction that the 
 Kaiser was overthrown not by the German So- 
 cialists, but by President Wilson. Every note 
 of the Secretary of State, Lansing, declaring 
 more and more clearly that negotiations with
 
 128 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the German people only would be considered, 
 and that no treaties would be made with the 
 personalities who were responsible for the war 
 and who had conducted the war, was like a new 
 blow upon the head of Scheidemann's group. 
 It was a perplexing moment for them. A 
 member of an imperial government, and, at 
 the same time a member of the Social Demo- 
 cratic Party, Scheidemann had to choose either 
 to support the Kaiser unconditionally, and so 
 to lose forever the masses; or to make a last 
 attempt to conserve the allegiance of the labor- 
 ing people, for a short time at least, and to 
 submit to President Wilson's will. The latter 
 course meant the overthrow of Wilhelm. It 
 was not a revolution. 
 
 I remember the first days of the armistice, 
 after the Kaiser had fled to Holland. Ger- 
 man armies were vacating the western front 
 and going back to Germany. I met many sol- 
 diers and talked to them, in Frankfort, in 
 Diisseldorf, in Cologne. I received almost the 
 same answer to my many questions. "We are 
 a people of order. We will maintain order. 
 The Kaiser did not succeed, therefore he Is 
 down, but we will maintain our stability with- 
 out him. We are an orderly people."
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 129 
 
 There spoke the voice of the wonderful 
 mihtaristic German machine with its implac- 
 able negligence of personal aspirations. There 
 was no sense of relief from autocracy, no 
 hatred of the old regime. The poison had been 
 too effective. I could not help comparing the 
 attitude of the Russian soldiers of the first 
 days of the Russian Revolution with the mood 
 of the German soldiers who filled all the halls 
 and rooms of the railroad station in Cologne 
 that night in November of 1918. The Russian 
 muzhiks had been proud of their red ribbons. 
 They had sung and played the Marseillaise. 
 They had enjoyed almost wildly their new 
 freedom. The several thousand German sol- 
 diers in the station at Cologne were sitting on 
 benches, lying on the floors, silent, with set 
 faces, looking as if deeply troubled by newly 
 mobilized thoughts. Somewhere in a corner a 
 stupid melody was being played on a mando- 
 lin. There was no conversation. It was 
 strange to walk among these gray-coated and 
 gray-capped men, and feel the silence of a 
 graveyard, rather than the silence which pre- 
 cedes a thunderstorm. A quiet voice, from 
 time to time, called out some numbers and 
 some hundreds of soldiers arose at each an-
 
 130 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 nouncement and went quietly away to take 
 their train homeward. It was the silence of a 
 defeated nation. They seemed to sense that 
 they were going to be punished, severely pun- 
 ished, and they knew by what means their 
 punishment would reach them. Their old Iron 
 Chancellor, Bismarck, had punished France in 
 the same way, once upon a time, and the Ger- 
 man soldiers and Scheidemann, the head of the 
 German "revolution," all felt that their turn 
 had come. That is why politically Germany 
 remained almost unchanged, the spirit of na- 
 tional offense prevented a spiritual revolution. 
 The Soldaten-rat (Soldiers' Council) was the 
 only exception. The backwardness of the Ger- 
 man Social Democracy, governed by the same 
 official nationalism shown during the war, 
 brought about a kind of social stagnation, so 
 that the Germans remained, socialty, during 
 the first period after the armistice, the same 
 nation they had been during the previous ten 
 or fifteen years. Therefore it was possible for 
 Liebknecht and Luxemburg to be killed while 
 Noske and Ebert stumbled about in the shoes 
 of Bismarck. The national feeling in Ger- 
 many blinded the eyes of the Germans to such 
 a degree that practically they employed blood
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 131 
 
 and iron, not so much to extirpate Bolshevism 
 or Sovietism, as maintain the power of the 
 well-organized German bourgeoisie. And the 
 latter had the satisfaction of seeing the Ger- 
 man Revolution suppressed not by themselves, 
 but by the Sociahsts. They left the responsi- 
 bility for conservatism to the old played-out 
 leaders of the Social Democracy, and kept for 
 themselves an unsullied political record in the 
 post-Kaiser period. The Germany of to-day 
 differs very little from the Germany of yes- 
 terday, or from the France and England of 
 to-day. The old centralistic traditions remain. 
 There is no relief from any of the old op- 
 pressors. The peace treaty only intensified and 
 narrowed the national spirit in Germany, and 
 closed the door to a new moral and social life. 
 Where nationalism is the basis of a state and 
 the people's lives, it is impossible to expect a 
 new social and international insight. The ex- 
 clusion of Germany from the league of na- 
 tions was one of the greatest of the many 
 mistakes made by the Alhed powers. It has 
 created a strong force against themselves, a 
 hindrance to their new "democratic" order. 
 
 Almost the same conditions prevailed in 
 Austria, where the national spirit became more
 
 132 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 acute because of the nationalistic tendencies of 
 their former enemies and present neighbors, the 
 Poles, the Ukrainians, the Hungarians, and 
 the Czecho-Slovaks. The Austrian Revolution 
 was likewise born under the tri-colored flag of 
 Deutsch-Oesterrich. 
 
 I remember the aged Victor Adler, on his 
 return from a conference with Emperor 
 Charles of Austria, being asked in one of the 
 stalls of the Austrian Parliament, what im- 
 pression that conference in Schonbrunn had 
 left on him. He answered with a weary smile : 
 "He is a good young fellow — but not for a 
 throne. He probably plays a good game of 
 billiards." And when this young "good fel- 
 low" disappeared, Austria became mechan- 
 ically a republic, built on a patriotic national 
 basis. From my place on the balcony of the 
 Palace of Minerva, in Vienna, I heard not a 
 word of a new social order. Dr. Renner and 
 Herr Seitz, both Socialist leaders, hoped for 
 unity only for the sake of the country and for 
 the saving of the German-Austrian nation. 
 The only sign of a revolution was in a half- 
 humorous incident that occurred when the 
 proclamation of the republic was read. When 
 the President of the Provisional National As-
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 133 
 
 sembly, Dr. Dighofer, cried out: "Long live 
 the German- Austrian Republic!" the national 
 flag was hoisted. Someone had torn away the 
 other two colors and left only the red, and 
 thousands were cheering, but no one knew what 
 kind of a republic was being cheered, — whether 
 it was the old German- Austrian Republic or 
 a new "Red" Republic. 
 
 I do not blame nor do I even pretend to 
 judge the Germans and the Austrians of that 
 time. I only wish to make plain that nation- 
 ality was the most instrumental, and perhaps 
 the only instrumental feature, of the revolu- 
 tion in the two countries. They overlooked the 
 basic social adjustments that were imperatively 
 called for by the condition of modern Europe, 
 and therefore they were, and still are, unable 
 to find any solutions of the problems they have 
 to face. The critical international position of 
 the Central Republics has been, of course, one 
 of the main factors in keeping patriotic senti- 
 ments at fever heat. This has been a great 
 hindrance to projects for a new social order; 
 for, apart from the desperate character of the 
 economic situation, there are good reasons for 
 believing that nationalism is not an adequate 
 basis for a country's life. Nationalism can be-
 
 134 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 come a helpful governing factor in the develop- 
 ment of a people only when it is rejected as the 
 be-all and end-all of its institutions. Taken as 
 a foundation for the structure of the state, 
 nationalism perpetually degenerates into ego- 
 tism, selfishness, and imperialism — or into pas- 
 sive retrogression. The Poles are the latest 
 examples of this deteriorative tendency. Their 
 whole political hfe, for many years, has been 
 based upon the assertion of nationalism. That 
 is why they are now the most aggressive na- 
 tion in Europe. The boundary controversies 
 that are seething in that caldron of little states 
 which was once the Central Empires arise from 
 similar causes. National aggressions and na- 
 tional assertions create a heavy fume of "pa- 
 triotism" which obscures the necessity for 
 internal reconstruction. In that atmosphere a 
 revolution is impossible. 
 
 Out of this immense cloud of potential revo- 
 lution in Europe one real revolution was pre- 
 cipitated — that of Bavaria. Walking in the 
 streets of Munich, the capital of European 
 artistic Bohemia, I felt all the time as if I were 
 in Petrograd in the March of 1917. The en- 
 thusiasm for the new life as represented by 
 Kurt Eisner, and the hatred for the old, was
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 135 
 
 patent in the tone and gesture of the city. The 
 soldier at the door of the Ministry of Foreign 
 Affairs (Kurt Eisner's office), the guards at 
 the Royal Palace, were manifestly creating 
 their own new order. The thought struck me 
 at that time — how different was Munich from 
 Cracow, Prague, Vienna, or Berlin; and the 
 difference was due to the spirit of Kurt Eisner 
 and Professor Foerster. During the war Kurt 
 Eisner never let slip an opportunity to express 
 his opinion that Germany was guilty and that 
 in many respects the AlHes were in the right. 
 It was he who was the maker of the first revo- 
 lution in the German states. Bavaria over- 
 threw King Leopold at the moment of Ger- 
 many's defeat, not because Mr. Wilson wanted 
 it done, but because the intransigeant Kurt 
 Eisner felt that that was the moment to win 
 the victory of which he had long dreamed. It 
 was the result of activity and not of a passive 
 acquiescence — a contrast to what happened in 
 Vienna and Berlin. Kurt Eisner's first efforts 
 were directed to the culmination of the idea of 
 a narrow nationalist patriotism. Since nation- 
 alism had engendered the war, it could not be 
 a point of departure for revolution. Eisner, 
 the leader of a revolution, inscribed its banner
 
 136 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 with the words cooperation and solidarity. 
 The old patriotic slogans were discarded. He 
 dreaded a fictitious "national" unity imposed 
 by Berlin. The relations between Munich and 
 Berlin were far from amicable. I recall a con- 
 versation I had with Eisner in his office in the 
 Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Munich, and I 
 still see his wonderful cheery smile, his ven- 
 arable gray hair, his slow mild motions, and I 
 hear his quiet, almost tender voice. This was 
 a different man from the Kurt Eisner of the 
 platform. I was rather surprised to see the 
 portrait of the Bavarian ex-king, Leopold, 
 hanging on the wall. I looked my surprise. 
 Eisner understood, and with his kindly smile 
 said, "I do not mind. It is perhaps a pleasure 
 for him to see a new Bavaria." "Wlien I asked 
 him about Germany in general, an almost stern 
 look came over his face. "I care not at all for 
 Germany. As long as the Germans are guided 
 by Berlin they do not interest me. We have 
 to get rid of Prussia." These were the words 
 of a man who was moved by a new spirit, who 
 wanted a new order and not merely a new name 
 for a slight change of the old. Just at that 
 time Switzerland had expelled some represen- 
 tative of the Soviet government who wanted
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 137 
 
 to get to Moscow through Bavaria. Kurt 
 Eisner told me this, and added, "I refused to 
 give them passes. I do not want, directly or 
 indirectly, to have any relation with the Gen- 
 eral Staff." He could not forgive the peace 
 of Brest-Litovsk. Neither Lenin, who ac- 
 cepted the peace, nor Scheidemann, who did 
 not protest against it, could he tolerate. 
 
 I asked him if he thought Bolshevism would 
 be possible in Bavaria. "I rather think not," 
 was the answer. "We are a countrj^ of peas- 
 ants and not of proletarians, and even our 
 agriculture is not fully developed. Socially I 
 do not see any possibilities of extremism; but 
 the political conditions may bring about a max- 
 imalism of the masses. It depends a gi*eat deal 
 upon the Entente. Although unofficially we 
 are on good terms with them, I have just re- 
 ceived from Foerster (the ambassador of the 
 new Bavaria in Switzerland) very good news 
 concerning this matter, but the stumbHng- 
 block is Berlin." 
 
 Berlin was Eisner's idee pee. He saw in 
 imperial Berlin not merely the enemy of the 
 Allies but the enemy of Germany itself. How 
 little encouragement the Allies actually gave 
 to Bavaria's attempt to break away from the
 
 138 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 domination of Berlin is a matter of familiar 
 history. The same international factors that 
 had played their part in the first Russian Revo- 
 lution came to the front iu southern Germany, 
 and Bavaria went through a period of Bolshe- 
 vism. Bavaria, however, had not the strength 
 which Russia derived from her fundamental 
 resources and her isolation. Beaten between 
 the hammer of Noske and the anvil of Clemen- 
 ceau, the Bavarian Revolution was crushed out 
 of existence. For the sake of preserving the 
 familiar forms of bourgeois government in 
 Germany the Allies were ready to keep the 
 old state machine going and support the cen- 
 tralized domination of Berlin. They were not 
 willing to break up the German Empire as 
 long as that could be accomplished only by 
 breaking up the system upon which the govern- 
 ments of the bourgeois western democracies are 
 
 based. 
 
 From this brief play of lights and side- 
 lights upon the various revolutions with which 
 I have had personal contact during the last 
 three years what conclusions can be drawn 
 about the nature of revolution itself? What 
 is the significance of a revolution in our times? 
 What is its contribution to our times? What
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 139 
 
 is the relation of revolution to the normal proc- 
 esses of the body politic? 
 
 Plainly a revolution is not an end in itself. 
 About the goal toward which it may move 
 there is perhaps ground for differences of 
 opinion. It seems to me that a revolution 
 should not be considered as a mere shifting of 
 political gears, for the purpose of speeding the 
 state machine toward social or political maxi- 
 malism. A revolution is essentially something 
 much more deeply human and personal than 
 that. It is primarily a protest against tra- 
 ditions, policies, and prejudices that have been 
 accumulated in the growth of a state. It is a 
 new effort of life to break through the' stifling 
 envelope that was created originally to protect 
 it. A revolution cannot according^ be made 
 — it must spontaneously grow. It is born in 
 the womb of the nation itself, and it makes its 
 way violently into the light of day, under a 
 baptism of blood. A metaphor does not carry 
 us very far in discussing the characteristics of 
 a revolution: for a revolution has the unique 
 feature of attaining its highest point of crea- 
 tive effort at the very first outburst of de- 
 struction. A revolution without violence can 
 have no creative power, at least during its first
 
 140 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 period. Its value is in proportion to the 
 thoroughness with which it is able to sweep 
 away a clotted mass of dead theories and ar- 
 chaic institutions. 
 
 We can discover some measure of the task 
 set before a European revolution if we recall 
 the characteristics of the old order in Europe. 
 The old order was based — as I have emphatic- 
 ally pointed out — upon a mechanical kind of 
 social solidarity, upon chauvinism, upon a fa- 
 natic belief in the divine mission of the state. 
 Society was permanently under the pressure 
 of these conceptions. The notion of moral 
 solidarity, a solidarity conscious of its respon- 
 sibility for the structural soundness of society, 
 was completely lacking in the old order. So- 
 ciety, according to the conventional way of 
 thinking, could be held together only by force 
 from without, never by attraction from within. 
 The old European order did not acknowledge 
 any responsibility except that for carrying out 
 the plans of groups which dominated it — in 
 many cases the plans of individual rulers and 
 magnates. The masses were in the same rela- 
 tion to the state as a factory is to its owner. 
 The owner is interested in the efficiency of his 
 factory, and in trying to obtain a maximum
 
 Revolutionary Contradictions 141 
 
 output he will usually keep his machines in 
 good order : but if he finds it possible to increase 
 production at the cost of the machine's life he 
 does not hesitate to do so. If he can lower the 
 cost of repairs and upkeep, and increase the 
 immediate returns he may carry out a penny- 
 wise economy which ends finally in the total 
 collapse of his factory organization. Whether 
 this degree of unenlightenment is character- 
 istic of all factory owners it was beyond doubt 
 characteristic of the rulers of modern Europe. 
 The war came. The machines went to pieces. 
 The organization broke down. And in that 
 terrible moment the upholders of the old order 
 discovered that the instruments which the 
 state had been treating as machines were in 
 fact conscious human beings with ideas of their 
 own about the life they purposed to live. The 
 revolution was, in a comprehensive sense, a re- 
 lease from machinery — the political machinery 
 of the ballot, the social machinery of classes, 
 the religious machinery of ecclesiasticism. 
 Life unlocked the armor of machinery, and 
 breathed freely and moved nimbly once more. 
 The value of a revolution can be measured 
 by the extent of its destruction. Here lies the 
 tragedy and the contradiction of revolution.
 
 142 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 It is a bitter paradox. "While a revolution is a 
 protest against violence, brutal force, mechani- 
 cal constriction, and human oppression, it is 
 compelled to use violent means against the ele- 
 ments which made it possible. Benevolence 
 cannot be its primary characteristic: it cannot 
 wish the old order well, for its very nature 
 forces it to the repulsive task of extermination. 
 The tragic dilemma of a revolution is that it 
 can clear the ground for its ideals only by 
 using methods which undermine them! It is 
 useless to deny the necessity for destruction; 
 it is rather much more to the point to dis- 
 criminate between the sort of havoc revolu- 
 tion brings in its wake and that which war 
 produces. Essentially, both war and revolu- 
 tion work with the same instruments. There 
 is, however, as much difference between inter- 
 national wars formally declared by govern- 
 ments and civil wars begun without declara- 
 tion by peoples as there is between the knife of 
 the murderer and the knife of the surgeon. 
 And it is the same kind of difference. The 
 murderer kills in the act of gratifying revenge 
 or seizing loot. His victim dies perhaps with- 
 out pain. The surgeon's knife, on the con- 
 trary, may cut with exquisite torture, but the
 
 It evolutionary Contradictions 143 
 
 surgeon uses it on his patient, regardless of 
 the shock, the loss of blood, and the discomfort, 
 in order that he may remove a tumor and save 
 a life.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ADDITIONAL CONTEMPLATIONS 
 
 It was towards the end of August in 1918, 
 near to the small town of Proskurov in south- 
 western Russia, that I saw for the first time the 
 ravages of war. My train was on the way to the 
 Austrian border, and all along the way, from 
 the border almost to Cracow, I saw great holes 
 in the fields, made by the huge shells which had 
 been fired by the Russian and Austrian armies 
 which had been fighting there. The fields were 
 not long to remain peaceful: two or three 
 months later they became the stage of the 
 Ukrainian-Polish conflict. But as I rode by 
 them there lay over the landscape a mournful 
 serenity — not the peace of life, but the peace 
 of death. I do not remember a single house 
 along the wayside that stood intact, or that 
 could be called a house. There were piles of 
 bricks, with half a wall, or two walls standing 
 about a chimney. For thousands of kilometers 
 
 144
 
 Additional Contemplations 145 
 
 wire entanglements and trenches ran across 
 the fields like the trail of a huge murderous 
 serpent, and among the spots of green that re- 
 mained here and there were scattered these 
 gashes in the earth. Instead of armies of men 
 I saw armies of crosses in memory of the men 
 who now reposed in the silence of death. 
 Among these crosses, and among these great 
 gashes in the earth, I noticed two old peasants, 
 a bent old couple, gathering a scanty harvest 
 which had grown over the graves of youth. It 
 was a silent and eloquent sjTnbol. Youth, the 
 best and greatest of it, is gone, and the bent 
 and aged and exhausted are left to reap the 
 grain that grows upon their graves. Who is 
 left to carry on a new life? Are the best aged 
 shoulders strong enough to carry the heavy 
 burdens of war and its results? Hundreds of 
 thousands of coils of wire remained in huge 
 piles on the field. They had not been used in 
 the war, and were left there at the mercy of 
 wind and weather. The products of many 
 thousand precious hours of human labor had 
 been transformed into smoke and fire, de- 
 stroyed forever. It is impossible to recover 
 this work of human hands. I asked myself: 
 "Was it only those material values that were
 
 146 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 burned and shattered and buried during this 
 war? Is it possible that we came out of it as 
 we went into it, without any moral or spiritual 
 loss?" 
 
 I could not help thinking that he who has 
 engaged himself to the work of killing, if only 
 for a little time, must lose his reverence for 
 human life. He must lose his consciousness 
 of the value of seeing eyes, beating hearts, and 
 speaking lips. Brutalization is inevitable. I 
 recalled some of the days of the Russian Revo- 
 lution, and I compared the graves under this 
 forest of crosses with the graves in the Place 
 of Mars, in Petrograd, where the victims of 
 the revolution are buried; compared the bat- 
 tle on this Galician theater of war with the 
 fight in the streets of Petrograd, Moscow and 
 Kief. In a battle man is always the same. 
 He kills — if he can. That is his business; 
 therein lies his value. The revolutionary sol- 
 diers of Kerensky were fighting under the ban- 
 ner "Long Live Comrade Kerensky." I saw 
 them at the front, fighting, and they were 
 brutes, murderers. The banner was for them 
 only a psychological rallying point to be borne 
 until the moment of the first shot, the first 
 thrust of the bayonet. And the Red Guards,
 
 Additional Contemplations 147 
 
 whom I saw taking Kief — their atrocities and 
 savagery which were described as devotion to 
 an ideal, differed in no way from the acts of 
 the Tsar's "patriotic" soldiers or the "heroic" 
 performance of the IMagyar cavalry on the Ga- 
 lician field. 
 
 Later in the afternoon of that same day I 
 came to a little to"\vn in Austrian Galicia 
 named Podvolochiska. There must have been 
 hot fighting in and around this little village. 
 I could not find a single undamaged house in 
 the center of the town. The suburbs and the 
 outskirts of the town had been entirely de- 
 stroyed. Since my train to Vienna was not yet 
 due I went for a short walk. I found on the 
 bare walls of some houses inscriptions written 
 with charcoal, in Russian. "The second bat- 
 tery, dirty Austrians." "The 21st battery 
 kill Jews." Profane words, written there by 
 an enemy army which had happened to occupy 
 this little town. 
 
 How strange it was to hear a song, sung by 
 soft childish voices, somewhere far in the dis- 
 tance ! I walked in the direction of the voices, 
 and as I walked slowly, in almost melancholy 
 depression, I suddenly noticed that the pave- 
 ment under my feet was of white, dark and
 
 148 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 brown marble, — the last substance one would 
 expect to find on a thoroughfare in a war-de- 
 stroyed village. Obviously this marble had 
 been brought here for another piu*pose. I 
 noted that these paving stones bore inscrip* 
 tions, and I read words in Hebrew, in Polish, 
 in German. 
 
 A tall, pale Jew, with a black beard, ap- 
 proached me with curious eyes. He saw that 
 I was a foreigner, and probably read the de- 
 pression and sadness in my face, for, without 
 waiting for me to question him, he said, "These 
 are the gravestones from the cemetery which 
 was there." He stretched out his hand and 
 pointed to a distance. "It was destroyed," he 
 added. He was silent for a moment, and then 
 said with a strange smile, "There is no ceme- 
 tery any more. Flat." I said not a word to 
 him. I wandered further toward the young 
 happy voices I had heard singing. I went on 
 more gravestones, out into the open field, in 
 the gloomy shades of the deepening twilight. 
 There, at some distance, near the edge of a 
 forest, was a circle of children dancing and 
 singing. I began to walk toward them, but 
 soon I was compelled to stop. The field was 
 indented with small ditches of dirty water and
 
 Additional Contemplations 149 
 
 alive with frogs. For a while I sensed nothing 
 but absolute silence. My ears were deaf to 
 the sounds of the children's voices. I saw 
 around me pieces of iron, steel, and — bones. 
 The skeleton of a horse's head, and a pile of 
 bones near it. I picked up one of them and 
 stood for a moment, trying to ascertain if it 
 had belonged to the skeleton of a horse or of a 
 man. 
 
 The field suddenly seemed full of shadows 
 and of ghosts. I was sure that beneath the 
 foul water in these ditches, formerly trenches, 
 lay the bodies of men who had fallen and were 
 forgotten, now covered with slime and corrup- 
 tion. 
 
 I walked away rapidly. I felt fear coming 
 over me. Strange that I should be afraid 
 now, for I had not felt fear under fire, when 
 I fought on the Dvinsk front. I had not been 
 horrified at seeing around me hundreds of 
 wounded and mutilated men. But here, in the 
 silence of a deserted battlefield, I became a 
 coward. I was afraid of a Nothing, of a fig- 
 ment and of the shadows of my own exhausted 
 brain and nerves. I ran away. I did not at- 
 tempt to find a lodging in the town, but hur- 
 ried back over the trottoir of gi-avestones, back
 
 150 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 to the station, where I waited alone until morn- 
 ing for my train for Vienna, haunted by the 
 ghosts of war and death. 
 
 Recalling now the thousands of impressions 
 of a similar nature, it seems to me a terrible, 
 almost a criminal mistake to think of the events 
 of the past few years only in terms of economics 
 — of distribution, production, efficiency, coop- 
 eration between labor and capital, and the rest. 
 Humanity lost more than the equilibrium of 
 economic relations when it mixed remnants of 
 human bodies with steel and iron and left them 
 to lie mingled with the bones of horses, under 
 the dirty water of frog-infested ditches. 
 Something more than industrial reconstruc- 
 tion is necessary to clear the fields from crosses 
 and the cemeteries from shells. Suppose for 
 a moment that we create a just, rigorously 
 equitable, and democratic method of distribu- 
 tion. Suppose everyone receives his proper 
 ration, as he deserves ; suppose that capital and 
 labor have found a new common ground, where 
 they can deliberate, adjust grievances, face 
 their common problems, and repair abuses of 
 power and authority. What will all this mean 
 to the millions of young healthy bodies, rot- 
 ting now under the harvest fields or under the
 
 Additional Contemplations 151 
 
 waters of ditches? How can we bring back 
 the immeasurable values which were burned on 
 the seven thousand miles of the European war 
 fronts? Though we work to the utmost for 
 a whole generation, we cannot hope to re- 
 place what was destroyed here in one brief 
 hour. 
 
 The Russians have a proverb, that "health 
 goes out by kilograms but comes back by milli- 
 grams." Every year of the war will require 
 ten or more years for recovery. Past wars, 
 those of Napoleon, Bliicher, Wellington, and 
 Moltke, are as nothing by comparison with this 
 last war. When Napoleon completely defeated 
 his enemies in 1806 at Erfurt, he captured 325 
 cannon, and the number of combatants on both 
 sides were only about forty-two thousand. A 
 poor army indeed, in comparison with the ar- 
 mies of our days, when in a small attack of 
 only "local importance," technically speaking, 
 on July 9, 1917, at Dvinsk, were killed and 
 wounded from ten o'clock in the morning until 
 four in the afternoon, more than eleven thou- 
 sand soldiers, or more than a quarter of both 
 belligerent armies at Erfurt. It will be im- 
 possible, therefore, to recover from this war as 
 quickly as France recovered in 1815.
 
 152 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 Our civilization, I have already pointed out, 
 had demoralized all individual initiative in 
 present-day Europe. Without protest the 
 peoples of the world had acquiesced in the war. 
 And in spite of the stern and incalculably sig- 
 nificant experience of the five bloody years 
 they are still in the thrall of the stale, one- 
 sided formulas by which the mind of Europe 
 had been mechanically regimented before the 
 conflict broke out. It matters little that our 
 attention has been called to the possibilities of 
 reconstruction and industrial democracy. 
 These, too, are the skeletons of formulas, and 
 though they have been logically articulated 
 they cannot stir and breathe and move. As I 
 passed over the battlefields of our friends and 
 enemies, as I rambled through the streets of 
 ruined cities, I felt that our plans for recon- 
 struction remained lamentably weak and in- 
 sufiicient. Our industrial problems and our 
 social difficulties could not be attacked by sim- 
 ple mechanical instruments. The question 
 was not simply one of engineering. It seemed 
 to me that our elaborate machinery could be 
 effective only if it were coupled to some great 
 moral "prime mover." An internal reconstruc- 
 tion, a new fire of passion and a new light of
 
 Additional Contemplations 153 
 
 intelligence, was necessary before even our 
 meanest plans oould be developed. 
 
 Let me not be mismiderstood. This is a 
 diagnosis, not an exhortation. I have no wish 
 to preach. Nothing but a candid sociological 
 analysis imposes upon me the conviction that, 
 after facing so manj^ material difficulties, we 
 are now compelled to lift ourselves out of our 
 spiritual bankruptcy if our civilization is not 
 entirely to go under. We must lay down be- 
 fore all things a common moral foundation 
 which will support in stable equilibrium the so- 
 cial structure of a renovated society. Without 
 that foundation, it seems to me, there can be 
 no adequate social structure — and no possi- 
 bility of renovation. 
 
 I do not think my analysis has led me astray. 
 I have sought to give full weight to the 
 economic factors that have entered into our 
 present situation. It seems plain to me 
 that they have conditioned our actions but 
 they have not determined them. The de- 
 sire for bread and butter does not lead 
 men, living in a world full of food, to kill each 
 other; and I do not fathom, accordingly, how 
 a transformation of our economic life, by itself, 
 will do away with national and class conflicts.
 
 154 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 unless at the same time our whole scheme of 
 morality is radically altered and fresh spiritual 
 values are introduced. I have seen revolu- 
 tionary soldiers engaged in a purely military 
 struggle and I did not see any difference be- 
 tween their behavior and that of non-revolu- 
 tionary soldiers. There was no difference, that 
 is to say, in their methods, and there was no 
 difference in the way that their methods re- 
 acted upon their personality. It is as easy to 
 become brutalized and degenerate in fighting 
 for a good cause as in fighting for a bad one. 
 The results are determined by the fact that 
 one must fight. 
 
 Now our common lack of moral conviction, 
 the reckless instability of our moral behavior, 
 has been perhaps the most overwhelming char- 
 acteristic of modern society. Our modern 
 states, in their attempt to foster and pre- 
 serve a spurious "prosperity," have depre- 
 ciated all our moral values, and have used them 
 simply as the tools of a governmental autoc- 
 racy. Christianity has been used deliberately 
 to preserve the vested privileges of the estab- 
 lished order. The lash that drove the money- 
 changers from the temple has been transformed 
 into a knout to keep the "rabble" in order so
 
 Additional Contemplations 155 
 
 that the money-changers, in court and on the 
 Bourse, may continue to transact their business 
 undisturbed. Art hkewise has become an in- 
 strument of political propaganda. How 
 infamously, for example, did artists betray 
 their mission during the war by accepting ser- 
 vice in the state and idealizing the gross facts 
 of the war by posters of high artistic merit 
 that dealt with motherhood and inspired our 
 finest altruistic instincts! Mothers sent their 
 sons gladly to their death because the state told 
 them, through the artists, not that they aimed 
 to seize political rights and concessions and 
 mineral deposits in distant lands, but that they 
 were simpty keeping the domestic hearth in- 
 violate. In the field of ethics the same condi- 
 tion was notorious. Our religious guides and 
 ethical teachers bent their minds to discovering 
 "moral" interpretations for the various events 
 of the war. They sanctified the heroism of the 
 trenches, and under their influence people were 
 exalted, and were morbidly attracted to those 
 who disdained death. In that atmosphere it 
 was easy to create the impression that we were 
 participating in a great enterprise, and that 
 humanity (though not, of course, our enemy!) 
 was marchinff forward into a new world. The
 
 156 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 result of this widespread moral prostitution has 
 now become evident. It is hardly possible to 
 find anywhere in the world a moral force which 
 remained sturdily independent, a force wliich 
 had not been misused and corrupted by the 
 war. The last few ethical values we had left 
 in 1914 — too weak to oppose the tragic debacle 
 of that year — even these few values were lost 
 in the maelstrom of iron and blood. Without 
 ethical values, however, society cannot remain 
 upright — and that is why Europe is collapsing. 
 
 The indications of this moral failure, with its 
 attendant likelihood of physical collapse, are 
 now evident on every hand. 
 
 On even a very superficial analysis of what 
 is now going on in Europe we can see that 
 humanity has lost, first of all, faith. We do 
 not believe each other any more, because we 
 have so long lied to each other. Hence the 
 spirit of to-day might be called the spirit of 
 intransigeant conflicts. Every group, every 
 case, is persuaded that it is right, that it 
 alone possesses the truth, and that therefore all 
 that is opposed to its final principles has to be 
 overthrown and annihilated. We are intoler- 
 ant, all of us, from the extreme Right to the 
 extreme Left. What does it mean, this in-
 
 Additional Contemplations 157 
 
 tolerance, translated into psychological terms? 
 It means that we have lost one of the most 
 powerful impulses of our human nature — the 
 impulse toward solidarity. Neither in fact nor 
 in theory do we any longer believe in the grow- 
 ing solidarization of our humanity, and ac- 
 cordingly we have only illusory authorities, 
 maintained by brutal force and "emergency 
 acts." 
 
 Solidarity implies first of all reconciliation. 
 It means the establishment of a common 
 ground and the working out of common ideas. 
 Instead of this we are witnessing among social 
 groups and political parties only dissensions 
 and "splits." Those whose ideas differ slightly 
 from the ideas and principles of their former 
 companions, leave their parties, their groups, 
 and find other catchwords with which to in- 
 fluence the masses. The present-day Socialist 
 movement is an instructive example of this 
 process. Never have we had so many parties 
 and groups. Is it not strange that at a time 
 of social revolution, when words and speeches 
 seek only to impress one idea, the idea of a 
 new unity and community — that at such a time 
 we should see the birth of a new party every 
 day? Even the International, which seemed to 
 
 ^
 
 158 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 be the ultima ratio of solidarity, no longer ex- 
 ists, because we have now two Internationals, 
 one at Berne and one at Moscow, and the 
 French and the German Independent Social- 
 ists are planning to organize still another. 
 
 Obviously we have lost ourselves among our 
 own petty aims and ambitions, at the moment 
 when the influence of spirit is most needed. 
 That is possibly only at a time when the real 
 
 communitary basis of society has been forgot- 
 ten. We have now instead a reign of social 
 egotism, which seems to me to be the most in- 
 fluential element of our time. It had grown 
 strong enough on the eve of the war, but the 
 war developed it and brought it up to become 
 the powerful social factor it is. This egotism 
 implies first of all the annihilation of moral 
 authority. We are pursuing, in our govern- 
 mental institutions, a policy of self-preserva- 
 tion by old means, giving to the most liberal 
 articles of our constitutions the most reaction- 
 ary interpretations. It is easy enough to 
 explain and say that because of the abnormality 
 and the unbalanced condition of our lives this 
 state of things is due to what may be called 
 "emergency" psychology, but whatever name 
 we give to the condition, it does not change the
 
 Additional Contemplations 159 
 
 actual state of affairs. This "emergency" psy- 
 cholog}^ means merely mob psychology, result- 
 ing from excited, sensitive nerves, which are 
 extremely responsive to the kind of "moral" 
 demonstration that consists in shouting the 
 loudest. The middle classes of Europe, com- 
 posed of those who lost during the war their 
 moderate prosperity and became proletarian- 
 ized, and of the small capitalists who by 
 profiteering became moderately wealthy — this 
 middle class wants simply order, quiet, rest. It 
 is satisfied with the fact that the war is over 
 and it does not want, as it did not want before 
 the war, and does not see, as it did not see be- 
 fore the war, any other mode of conduct. The 
 middle classes of France, England, and Ger- 
 many are the controllers of Europe to-day, and 
 Noske as well as Clemenceau, and Clemenceau 
 as well as Lloyd George, are the expression of 
 a stagnant marais of European society which 
 is ready to support any kind of reactionary 
 policy for the purpose of bringing about order 
 — their order. The proletarian masses, tired 
 and exhausted by the war, disappointed and 
 discouraged by lies and deceptions, must — and 
 it is inevitable — rely upon themselves. That 
 is why the main feature of our social struggle
 
 160 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 in Europe to-day is not that of a struggle for 
 a new and different social order, but a struggle 
 for political and social power. That is the idea 
 behind the "dictatorship of the proletariat" 
 in Russia. That explains the dictatorial gov- 
 ernmental system of Noske. That is why we 
 are being furnished with forecasts and prophe- 
 cies of a "labor government" in England. 
 
 We do not think in social categories; we 
 think in forms of governmental power. We 
 are witnessing a kind of race for governmental 
 power, and we are betting on who will finish 
 first. The idea of a rule of power is psycho- 
 logically and socially a conservative idea. It 
 implies a suppression of opposing forces, and 
 not a solidarization of them. A mass, a mob, 
 requires a hero, and it is not necessary that the 
 hero be a person, an individual. Occasionally 
 the skeleton of an idea stands for the hero be- 
 fore the hero himself actually arrives. The 
 hero of to-day is Power, and therein lies our 
 weakness. 
 
 Through a long period of history we neg- 
 lected all our normal impulses, and we are now 
 paying the penalty of that neglect. So that, 
 practically, we no longer recognize any "ma- 
 jority" or "minority" or "votes." If the mi-
 
 Additional Contemplations 161 
 
 norlty is not satisfied it will go on acting alone, 
 and to-morrow perhaps the majority of to-day 
 will be the minority, because the masses have 
 lost their equilibrium. 
 
 In June, 1917, Trotsky addressed a gather- 
 ing of about 12,000 working men, and could 
 scarcely make himself heard amid the hissing 
 which greeted him. Four months later he was 
 the god of those same working men, who were 
 then hissing Kerensky and all the moderate 
 Socialists. Such a quick transformation of 
 spirit is due to the nervous and emotional in- 
 stability of the masses, who have no time to bal- 
 last themselves with thought and who are in- 
 capable of analyzing conditions. The distrust, 
 the loss of faith, the lack of moral authority, 
 created an atmosphere of despair, which is one 
 of the most important elements in creating an 
 aspiration for power. In times of despair we 
 do not reflect whether we are right or wrong, 
 or whether it is safe to undertake one thing or 
 another. At such times all our forces are 
 moved by the desire for activity. Only im- 
 mediate, direct action can satisfy. Accord- 
 ingly we are able to distinguish in the behavior 
 of the European masses two very definite and 
 different kinds of mob psychology. The first is
 
 162 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 born of the despair of the last few years, and 
 of the desperate atmosphere created by the 
 growing reaction of the government and of the 
 middle classes. Out of this despair rises the 
 revolutionary spirit, a spirit of antagonism 
 which will admit no compromise. This leads 
 the masses to center their efforts on getting 
 hold of the machinery of state. Socially in- 
 evitable, and justifiable, this revolutionary 
 spirit develops along lines of a mechanistic con- 
 ception of power, rule, dictatorship and re- 
 venge. On the other hand we have, as natural 
 by-products of the war, the French poilu, the 
 English Tommy, the German Feldgrau. Ideal-' 
 ized during the war, the common soldiers live 
 in an atmosphere of war psychology even after 
 their demobilization. They bring the militaris- 
 tic spirit of the trenches back into the cities and 
 into the homes. Their spirit of pride has been 
 artificially fostered. They demand to be re- 
 spected as heroes, saviours of the country, and 
 they are ready to suppress their own country- 
 men with the same methods they lately sup- 
 pressed and conquered their enemy. They 
 have no ideas, they are possessed by the 
 psychological, almost the zoological spirit of 
 combat, of employing brute force against the
 
 Additional Contemplations 163 
 
 nearest opposing rival or enemy. I cannot re- 
 sist the temptation to paraphrase a French 
 saying, "Not to know French orthography is a 
 disgrace; to know it is no great merit." Not 
 to defend one's country may be a disgrace, but 
 to serve it is no great merit. Those who are 
 bent on using force think of nothing else. 
 They try to represent it as the most laudable 
 work, and seek to conceal its sanguinary reali- 
 ties by talk of "freedom and independence." 
 
 Incidentally I want to say that this is one 
 of the worst results of war. Every war, even 
 "the war to end war," is not only a concrete 
 crime because it is a process of killing, but it 
 is a crime in itself because it corrupts our 
 minds, depriving us of the precious feeling for 
 the value of humajn life — and the value of a 
 human being jyer se. Nothing is now so dear 
 as freedom — which does not exist — and noth- 
 ing is now so cheap as human life, because life 
 in itself is worth nothing now. What alone 
 seems to have value is my life. 
 
 The tragedy of our days is that out of the 
 graveyards of the war have risen so many un- 
 solvable problems that it is become impossible 
 for Europe to find an issue other than in revo- 
 lution, which means a new and a different kind
 
 164 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 of war. I am myself a Russian revolutionist, 
 and I have devoted almost all my conscious 
 activities to the revolution. So that I have, 
 perhaps, a better right than some others to say 
 that a revolution is the greatest of social disas- 
 ters. Inevitable as a revolution may be, it is a 
 total rearrangement of social forces — destruc- 
 tive and bloody. Wliere a rearrangement can 
 be achieved without blood the people will be 
 immeasurably happier. And yet revolutions 
 must come. . . . 
 
 I remember the last few days before the 
 overthrow of the Tsar, when the business of the 
 city of Petrograd had almost ceased because 
 of strikes and unrest. A number of people 
 came to the radical leader of the Duma, Keren- 
 sky, to ask his opinion about what was happen- 
 ing. Nobody knew what to do, what to say to 
 the masses, with what slogans to appeal to 
 them. 
 
 "Does it mean a revolution?" was the ques- 
 tion. "I beheve that a revolution will come," 
 said Kerensky, "but not now, not yet. We 
 have to wait a much longer time for that." 
 
 Three days later that same man was the soul 
 of the revolution. In spite of lack of leader- 
 ship, in spite of an abysmal ignorance of the
 
 Additional Contemplations 165 
 
 general conditions, revolution came. A revolu- 
 tion, a real revolution, is without an organized 
 army. It has just such an army as we could 
 see in the streets of Petrograd, in 1917, — stu- 
 dents, workers, soldiers, civilians, young girls, 
 boys, all without any previous training, with- 
 out any knowledge of military science. They 
 did not even know how to kill, how to extin- 
 guish human life. War, in order to make the 
 masses active, demands some specially invented 
 incentive, slogans in most cases, a revolution 
 has no need for dictated and suggested slo- 
 gans. A revolution dictates and suggests its 
 own slogan. In a regular army we must de- 
 stroy any individual consciousness and initia- 
 tive in the brains of the soldier; a soldier's 
 brain must be a blank so that he shall react only 
 to orders from above. In a revolution we are 
 helpless unless the masses possess a certain 
 amount of understanding of their own. The 
 revolutionary masses have their own ideas and 
 aspirations, and they must understand them. 
 It is impossible, therefore, "to declare" a revo- 
 lution. Only when it comes from below, when 
 the lower strata of the social formation become 
 active, only then can a revolution arise. A 
 war, from the social point of view, is the result
 
 166 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 of a controversy between two or more inter- 
 national ambitions. The peoples know noth- 
 ing about them. The peoples are but the can- 
 non fodder. A war, therefore, must bring 
 about, a priori, a social disintegration, the basis 
 of which is hatred and revenge. 
 
 A revolution is always a reaction against 
 egoistic class oppression, and is a movement to- 
 wards a new solidarity. Being the protest of a 
 people it is an appeal to a new solidarity and 
 justice. The bloody and immoral features of a 
 revolution are not born in the ranks of the 
 masses, but are created by those who are the 
 cause of the revolution. In short we must 
 recognize that a revolution can only be com- 
 pared to an instinctive effort of self-defense, 
 while a war is a premeditated and planned 
 criminal assault. 
 
 It is certainly to be regretted that in the 
 twentieth century our civilization and social 
 order had not in itself a sufficient moral spirit 
 to avoid the accumulation of social protest and 
 revolution; that having passed through his- 
 torical periods of philosophic depth and relig- 
 ious height, modern Europe transformed all 
 her values into tools and instruments of pos- 
 session and suppression. Our revolutions are
 
 Additional Contemplations 167 
 
 thus more cruel and more bloody than those of 
 the past. The spirit of revenge and despair 
 has too deeply imbued itself into the hearts of 
 the peoples. A "good modern European" 
 could, perhaps, find in the atrocities of the Rus- 
 sian Revolution one more excuse for disgust 
 with the masses, and for a desire for a benevo- 
 lent enlightened autocracy, but he would make 
 a mistake — as many modern statesmen have 
 done. Europe simply sees her own fate, but 
 she does not understand the meaning of events 
 because she is accustomed to think in utilitarian 
 terms of practice and advantages. A revolu- 
 tion, if an ethical interpretation of it is neces- 
 sary, is the most conspicuous and the most defi- 
 nite demonstration of self-sacrifice. A people 
 educated in and Hving under a certain order, 
 fixed in certain habits, bearing on their own 
 shoulders the hea\'y burden of an historical tra- 
 dition, suddenly throw away this complex 
 inheritance and are willing to perish in order to 
 bring about a change in the direction of prog- 
 ress. They do not ask, "how much will it 
 cost?" They do not measure what the contri- 
 butions will be. They simply go on and fight; 
 and field and street and palace are to them 
 merely the theaters that provide the stage for
 
 168 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the acting of their tragedy. A war is first of 
 all a sacrifice of human beings who do not know 
 what they are fighting for, and who do not 
 want to lose their lives. I expect that the 
 "good civilized European" will object very 
 strongly to these terms, and will quote as 
 against me, thousands of heroic deeds and the 
 spirit of self-sacrifice and magnanimity which 
 was so splendidly manifested during the war. 
 When I read of these deeds and their fine spirit 
 I was profoundly impressed by what the 
 human spirit can achieve in battle, but later, 
 when I learned from personal experience what 
 a trench means, what an infantry attack and 
 the artillery preparations for it imply, I under- 
 stood that all these performances of heroism 
 are simply demonstrations of what our human 
 nature is capable of, and of how it can be mis- 
 used. For in a trench or on a front, heroism, 
 self-sacrifice and hatred of death are alike arti- 
 ficial. They are simply reactions in an atmos- 
 phere of blood and fire. These reactions are 
 interpreted in the newspapers which are read 
 at peaceful firesides in the smoke of a good 
 cigar, by the readers who see no difference be- 
 tween the smoke of the cigar and the smoke of 
 the field cannon.
 
 Additional Contemplations 169 
 
 I recall a Colonel of the Hussars, whom I 
 met in Budapest after the revolution, apologiz- 
 ing to me for being my former enemy. He 
 said that he loved the Russians, and I was 
 rather surprised at his acquaintance with the 
 works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, from which 
 he quoted freely. "Even when I was on the 
 Galician front and fighting against the Rus- 
 sians I was not their enemy," he said. "You do 
 not understand," and I saw fiery gleams in his 
 eyes, "what a fight means. I remember one 
 cold snowy night, we rode on horseback to a 
 valley near a little river. We knew that in a 
 nearby forest were the Russian cavalry, and 
 we stopped and waited. I will never forget the 
 sensations we experienced. We were waiting 
 for our enemy, and our only thought was that 
 we were going to fight — ^we were going to 
 fight. We felt that we were fighting a brutal 
 Tsar," and he smiled, "and we felt that it was 
 glorious to fight against him. But we were 
 not fighting you, the Russian people." 
 
 The conversation took place in a coffee 
 house. I hurried to pay my check and got 
 away. I did not hate this Hussar, but I could 
 not remain in his company. I walked past one 
 of the most wonderful structures in the world.
 
 170 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the Elizabeth bridge over the Danube, and 
 wandered for many hours among the ruined re- 
 mains of an old fortress of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. That Magyar Hussar was a real illus- 
 tration of war based upon that most inhuman 
 institution — universal compulsory conscription 
 — when to fight and to kill becomes an 
 ideal. 
 
 I understood the Colonel very well. It is 
 true that he did not think about the Russian 
 people when he was fighting, but he did not 
 think about the Tsar either, and he was not a 
 hero. A human being, with a human language, 
 he bore in his nature the instincts of a lion or a 
 tiger. The beauty of such heroism is perhaps 
 less than the beauty of the toreador who fights 
 a bull. War is simply the opportunity to sat- 
 isfy the instinct to kill ; and our modern state, 
 instead of getting rid of it, has simply brought 
 it to greater perfection. That is what makes 
 a war different from ai revolution, and that is 
 what makes a revolution a decisive answer to 
 war. 
 
 I wish to repeat that the economic back- 
 ground of our lives, of wars, and of revolutions, 
 can often become very strong and very influ- 
 ential motives, but our moral and spiritual
 
 Additional Contemplations 171 
 
 qualities also play important roles. In spite 
 of class consciousness, and in spite of the eco- 
 nomic interpretation of history — or perhaps be- 
 cause of it — many of our European leaders 
 failed to see the real meaning of the war, 
 whether offensive or defensive matters little. 
 They missed understanding our ethical back- 
 ground, the importance of moral elements, and 
 the value of individual perfection. As I have 
 pointed out, the war was not something excep- 
 tional. It only demonstrated more clearly 
 what elements were influential in our civiliza- 
 tion. The general cry of "lack of leadership" 
 has to be understood and heeded. It means 
 that the individual has been killed. It means 
 that his impulses have been annihilated. 
 
 Undoubtedly we need a regeneration. We 
 must revise all our social ideals and theories. 
 We have to create not new institutions but a 
 new social gospel. Institutions are sometimes 
 extemporaneous things — the Soviets for in- 
 stance. Institutions are the acknowledgment 
 of facts and the expressions of them, but never 
 are they acts of creation. Therefore no league 
 of nations, no new parliaments, no divisions of 
 teiTitory, can change modern Europe. A new 
 life and a new religion must come into Europe,
 
 172 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 a religion which will first of all have for its 
 keystone the value of an individual, per se, and 
 a belief in society as a solidarized gathering of 
 individuals. The day of bloody contests for 
 power must end.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 LIGHTS AND SHADOWS 
 
 The Russian Revolution and the failure of 
 the Russian intellectual elements have precipi- 
 tated new political forces with new ideals, 
 which are known under the name of Bolshe- 
 vism. It is necessary that we have a clear 
 understanding of this term, Bolshevism, since 
 because it is being used with many and varied 
 meanings, often false and misleading. 
 
 On the steamer which brought me to the 
 United States, I became acquainted with an 
 American gentleman who was in a somewhat 
 important political position in his country. He 
 was just then returning from the Peace Con- 
 ference and London with an accumulated mass 
 of information and facts. He seemed eagerly 
 interested to meet a Russian, and especially a 
 Russian who had been connected with the first 
 revolutionary government. We conversed to- 
 gether for several hours on international poli- 
 
 173
 
 174 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tics, and I confess, I found it difficult to listen 
 to some of the silly statements he made — silly, 
 because he was but repeating what he had read 
 in the jingo newspapers of Paris and London. 
 And he quoted then from a notebook in which 
 he had carefully transcribed them. So extraor- 
 dinary were those tales and fanciful facts of 
 Russia that they could be created only by a 
 terrified mob. To most of his "incontrovertible 
 facts" I replied by informing him that at one 
 time it was the general belief among Euro- 
 peans, and even among a few scholars who it 
 might be expected would know better, that big 
 white bears walked freely and unmolested 
 along the streets of Petrograd, the capital of 
 this strange country, and that during the win- 
 ter months railroad trains passed under tun- 
 nels of snow. I tried to show him how absurd 
 were the general notions entertained by the 
 rest of Europe about Russia and its people. 
 We kept up our conversation for some hours, 
 during which time we discussed Bolshevism 
 both as a political factor and as a political 
 ideal. At the end of our talk the American 
 expressed himself as being highly pleased and 
 then, in the very act of shaking my hand, 
 in parting, he asked, with a bright smile, "May
 
 Lights and Shadows 175 
 
 I ask you, practically, what Bolshevism 
 means?" I could not help laughing, and I an- 
 swered, "You should have begun with that 
 question. It is now somewhat too late. You 
 have been too well informed by Paris and 
 London." 
 
 Russian Socialists are not now what they 
 were years ago, the Russian Social Democrats 
 who were opposed to the slow political tactics of 
 the orthodox Marxians of Germany, were in 
 the majoritj'- among Russian Socialists. They 
 split the party and seceding from the minority, 
 or the Mensheviks, called themselves Bolshe- 
 viks, or the majority. They stood simply for 
 a more active and more aggressive attitude 
 against Tsarism, and cooperated mostly with 
 the Russian Social Revolutionists who formed 
 the Left Wing of the Russian Socialist Party. 
 
 During the Russian Revolution the methods 
 of the Bolsheviks began to be called Bolshe- 
 vism, but they very soon gave up this name 
 and called themselves Communists. To-day 
 the word Bolshevism is used in five different 
 senses. First, there is the popular use, which 
 may be said to mean murder, rapine, and atroc- 
 ity. Second, it is used as a synonym for Soviet- 
 ism as represented by the present Russian
 
 176 TJie Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 government; a new political institution which 
 is sometimes explained, wrongly it seems to 
 me, by the expression, "the dictatorship of the 
 proletariat." Third, it stands for Communism, 
 which is not a new political idea, but which is a 
 combination of the final goals of the Socialist 
 ideal with those of Anarchists and Syndicalists. 
 Fourth, by Bolshevism is often meant a pro- 
 testing spirit. Any man, dissatisfied with his 
 country's government, who criticizes it from 
 the point of view of so-called Progressivism, is 
 called a Bolshevist. Fifth, it is applied to all 
 who attempt to employ liberal ideas to better 
 conditions of the times, and who attempt a dis- 
 interested analysis of the unhappy experiences 
 of the war. These last are sometimes termed 
 *'Pro-Germans." There are many other mean- 
 ings given to the word, as occasion or circum- 
 stances demand, but the above five are most 
 often employed. 
 
 The most important thing, however, is to 
 know that Bolshevism or Communism seems to 
 be a new political theory with a new political 
 practice. In the final analysis of Bolshevist 
 aims we see no specifically new element. Al- 
 most all Socialists would agree with the pur- 
 pose of Bolshevistic ideals. It is not here that
 
 Lights and Shadows 177 
 
 we find the point of divergence. That is found 
 when we are met with the Bolshevist assertion 
 that Europe is ripe economically for the imme- 
 diate reahzation of the principles of Socialism. 
 A discussion on that matter seems to me to be 
 futile. Discussions are fruitful and proper be- 
 fore we begin to act. Thej^ help us then to see 
 our way more clearly. And after we have 
 acted discussions enable us only to find the 
 cause for our success or failure. But at the 
 moment when the machinery of political and 
 social ends is set in motion discussions are a 
 hindrance rather than a help. The knowledge 
 possessed by the masses becomes too strong and 
 too vital a force, the impetus of which cannot be 
 stopped either by theorizing or hatred. It is 
 for this reason that the Bolshevists have put 
 out of their consideration the question as to 
 the readiness of Europe for the estabhshment 
 of a Socialist regime. Whether Europe be 
 ripe for Socialism or not, it is certain that it is 
 ripe enough, or rotten enough, to need a new 
 social order. So that the Bolsheviki, or the 
 Russian Socialists are not now what they were 
 at the beginning of their activities. They have 
 had to overcome difficulties within themselves, 
 and they have learned lessons from the two
 
 178 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 years of governmental practice. These expe- 
 riences have taught them to be less definite in 
 their statements, so that they no longer talk of 
 pure Socialism but of a new social order. And 
 yet, as we see it, this cannot be considered as 
 the main cause for the desperate sti*uggle that 
 is now taking place between the old Europe 
 and the new Russia. The cause lies deeper, in 
 the new philosophy of Bolshevism itself. I say 
 new philosophy because it is not only new to 
 the world outside Russia, but it is new to the 
 Communist leaders of Russia themselves. It is 
 the spontaneous generation in an atmosphere 
 of revolution thought and struggle. 
 
 The theorists of Russian Communism im- 
 parted two new elements, that of a permanent 
 revolution and that of the social order. At the 
 time of the split in the Russian Social Demo- 
 cratic Party to which I have referred, the So- 
 cialist struggle was very far from being Bolshe- 
 vik. The Bolsheviki were between the two 
 revolutionary groups, the Right Wing Social- 
 ists, or Mensheviki, and the Left Wing radical 
 revolutionists who employed terror as a means 
 for the overthrow of aristocracy. The Bolshe- 
 viki rejected the use of the terror method. As 
 pure Marxians they placed little value on the
 
 Lights and Shadows 179 
 
 individual in the social evolution, and they 
 cared less as to whether one reactionary more 
 was killed by terroristic groups. When, in 
 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia, he entertained 
 the idea of a united Socialist party, with no 
 division between right and left wings, or Men- 
 shevists and Revolutionaries. And it is a mat- 
 ter of grave doubt if he had, at any time, any 
 conception of Sovietism. If he had he kept it 
 very secret. He may have thought of it after 
 beholding the despair and distrust within the 
 mass of Russian revolutionaries; but that also 
 is to be doubted. Under Kerensky, however, 
 the idea of a constituent assembly, the rejection 
 of terror, the emergency laws, the abolition of 
 capital punishment, the doctrine of pacifism 
 were the main planks in the Bolshe^^st plat- 
 form, and the main causes for the success and 
 victory of the Bolsheviki. 
 
 It was only shortly before Kerensky's dovni- 
 f all that Lunacharsky and a few minor leaders 
 of the Bolshevist party began to talk of a per- 
 manent revolution. It was when the Con- 
 stituent Assembly had failed to vote for an 
 immediate peace that Lenin gave expression 
 to the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, 
 through the dictatorial Soviets. He had
 
 180 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 probably thought previously that a mixed rep- 
 resentation of all the economic classes (Con- 
 stituent Assembly) could exist as a regulating 
 body, provided the political and social com- 
 batants and the officials of the Soviets were 
 given constitutional rights. But the Constitu- 
 ent Assembly rejected the Soviets, and Lenin 
 dissolved it. It was after this dissolution that 
 the Soviets were established as a new form of 
 a new state, and it then became evident what 
 was in the minds of the leaders of this new revo- 
 lution. 
 
 As I understand the doctrine of Sovietism, 
 if it can be called a doctrine, it holds two fun- 
 damental ideas. First, the employment of the 
 tactics and methods of the Real-politih of 
 modern Europe; and, second, engaging in 
 revolution for the abolition of old systems and 
 the destruction of old people, but in revolution 
 as a permanent state of things. By this means, 
 through many changes and a long time, the 
 right end could be attained. 
 
 Real-politik, as has been amply illustrated 
 in the events of the last few j^^ears, is putting 
 into practice the maxims practiced by Machia- 
 velli in his "The Prince" and so subtly em- 
 ployed by politicians and statesmen since the
 
 Lights and Shadows 181 
 
 time of the French Revolution. To think of 
 realizing good, happiness and justice by means 
 of ruthless force consistently applied is, to my 
 mind, a most unhappy way of bringing about 
 the world's welfare. As I have already said, 
 to lay more importance on the state than on 
 society, to emphasize political force over politi- 
 cal cooperation, to aim at utilitarianism instead 
 of justice, must inevitably produce such a col- 
 lapse as we have just witnessed in the world — 
 a political, social and moral collapse. And, 
 finally, it is impossible, by these means, to 
 develop a new life. 
 
 The questions arise, naturally, are the Bol- 
 shevik! guilty in using these old methods, or is 
 the trouble in the conditions in which they find 
 themselves ? But these questions are at bottom 
 merely matters for political speculation. I am 
 interested in putting them merely as a theorist 
 of political practice. Many ardent advocates 
 for these methods may even cite Christ as an 
 example, since He whipped the money-chang- 
 ers out of the Temple in Jerusalem. But if 
 acts of this nature had been habitual with 
 Christ, we should, probably, know Him to-day 
 as a political agitator or, at best, as a Jewish 
 political thinker anxious for the welfare of
 
 182 The Passing of tlie Old Order in Europe 
 
 the Jewish state at a time when it was sinking 
 morally and socially under the yoke of Roman 
 rule. The light that has come to us through 
 two thousand years is not from the Temple but 
 from Calvary. 
 
 It may be argued, by way of objection to my 
 statements, that violence is inevitable on cer- 
 tain occasions and I will agree that it may be 
 necessary at certain moments. But it never 
 can be necessary over periods, for that would 
 mean not the establishment of a social system, 
 but continual reactions making such an estab- 
 lishment impossible. The difference between 
 the violence of revolution and the violence 
 which a revolution overthrows is that the old 
 violence is a system, while the new is a spon- 
 taneous and momentary reaction. There 
 would be no difference if the new violence lost 
 its character as a spontaneous and immediately 
 necessary act. It may also be argued that his- 
 tory demonstrates the success of the continuous 
 use of old methods and that progress is 
 achieved by their means. To that I can only 
 answer in the words of Hegel, who, when his 
 students told him that facts did not quite fit in 
 with his theories, said: "So much the worse for 
 the facts." Still, it would be possible to defeat
 
 Lights and Shadows 183 
 
 this revolutionary Machiavellianism so well 
 known to us since the sixteenth century, if the 
 other element of the Communist doctrine were 
 not involved, namely, that of a permanent 
 revolution. The idea of a permanent revolu- 
 tion is verv little known outside Russia, and in 
 Russia itself it was temporarily discarded be- 
 cause of international complications and for- 
 eign intervention which militarized the nation. 
 So much for philosophic Bolshevism and 
 Communism as a political and social method. 
 It is well known that the Bolshevists at first 
 were not in the majority either in the Soviets 
 or in their unions. They had to invent some 
 means by which they could obtain a majority. 
 To this end Trotzky and his followers promul- 
 gated a new fundamental principle. Asserting 
 that the old principle of electing parliamentary 
 representatives for a definite term was defunct, 
 they laid it down that elections should take 
 place whenever and as often as the mind of 
 the people changed. Every district, every so- 
 cial unit, and every organization may recall at 
 will their representative and elect and send a 
 new representation. This principle made it 
 possible for them to bring about by-elections 
 in many parts of Russia as soon as the people
 
 184 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 there had become sufficiently Bolshevikized. I 
 can see no special objection to this principle, 
 but at the time it was put into practice it was 
 
 highly indicative of the main character of 
 Bolshevist idea and methods. The Bolshevists 
 have an almost religious, almost frantic faith in 
 the masses as such. Dynamic masses are their 
 ideal. But they overlooked, and still overlook 
 the fact that the masses, even the self-conscious 
 masses, are often transformed into mobs, and 
 the dynamic power of a mob may scarcely be 
 reasoned with. 
 
 I have not invented the terminology,! al- 
 though I confess it sounds very disturbing. It 
 is so liable to misuse by the able opponents of 
 social progress. But the terminology seems to 
 me to express clearly and accurately the condi- 
 tions as they exist. It was invented by one of 
 
 the fathers of Russian Socialism, M. K. 
 Mikhailovsky, to whom we are indebted for the 
 
 ablest exposition of the philosophy of revolu- 
 tionary Socialism. He is an exponent of 
 the biological theory of social development. 
 "When I ask," he said, "how I am to trans- 
 form a mob into a society, biology answers me 
 by tracing the development of the herd into a 
 mob." "I cannot call them people," he once
 
 Lights and Shadows 18.5 
 
 said, "the mob which will rush into my room 
 and tear down the portrait of Belinsky (the 
 famous Russian writer) and break the bust of 
 Necrassof" (the Russian radical poet). 
 
 The fallacy in the Bolshevist reasoning lies 
 in including people as well as mob in the term 
 "masses." The blind faith in the "masses" is 
 a silent but potent indication that they accept 
 the crowd and the crowd psychology as the 
 most justifiable factors in social life. Such an 
 acceptance implies the further acceptance of 
 two very dangerous factors. The first is that 
 revolution is a blow, a moment of spontaneous 
 destruction. Immediately following this blow 
 there arises the necessity for stabilizing the so- 
 cial forces, for a constructive life. Now it is 
 very difficult to know when the elements of 
 construction begin under such conditions. 
 The)^ certainly were not present on the down- 
 fall of the Tsar and the establishment of a 
 political democracy, for then the real destruc- 
 tive work began. I take it that the work of 
 construction must begin, not when we have 
 reached a point beyond which we may not go, 
 but when we have completely changed the so- 
 cial element. As soon as the old codes, as a 
 system, are done with we must give up destroy-
 
 186 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 ing and turn to constructing. For this pur- 
 pose we must gather all our intellectual forces, 
 relying on the masses to help us, but not being 
 guided by them. So that when a revolution 
 puts power into the hands of a group or a 
 class, even dictatorial power, we must immedi- 
 ately begin to solidarize the social forces. The 
 Communist theory omits the necessity for this 
 solidarization, and, therefore, admits of no com- 
 promise or cooperation. It creates fundamen- 
 tal principles of a rule by a minority. Gov- 
 ernment by a minority is dangerous, not be- 
 cause it is opposed to the traditional idea of 
 democracy and the traditional worship of the 
 majority, but because such government neces- 
 sitates the employment of continuous violent 
 methods and maintaining continuously, in the 
 minds of the masses, a consciousness of danger 
 and the necessity for destruction. And that is 
 the second dangerous factor. Under such a 
 condition the masses are permanently mobs, 
 able only to hate, to fight and to destroy. 
 
 Every revolution is an extraordinary means 
 of education. A people that has accomplished 
 the overthrow of the older experiences a sense 
 of great relief. They realize that they have 
 broken the shackle which bound them and a
 
 Lights and Shadows 187 
 
 communal, brotherly enthusiasm takes posses- 
 sion both of the masses and the crowds. I re- 
 member well the strange kindness and tender- 
 ness evinced by the people of Petrograd during 
 the first weeks of the revolution, and especially 
 after the Tsar was arrested. I saw not a sign 
 of animosity or distrust. All were eager to 
 show affection and faith in each other, to help 
 each other, to cooperate for the common weal. 
 I can never forget the young Russian student, 
 a girl of about nineteen years of age. She was 
 engaged in work for the Petrograd Council of 
 Workmen and Soldiers and in distributing 
 bread and soup to the people who crowded the 
 palace of Taurida for days and nights. I saw 
 her one day looking with a happy smile at a 
 soldier, who had fallen asleep while standing on 
 guard in the palace. I greeted her. "Is it not 
 true, comrade," she asked me, "that it is worth 
 while to die now? People are happy and free. 
 Oh, I en\y those who have fallen !" 
 
 A revolution is a marvelous education so 
 long as it remains as an act, an effort ; but un- 
 less it is permanently inspired by the spirit of 
 progress, it will breed permanent hatred. De- 
 voted as I was to the Russian Revolution, I 
 could not but feel, when I saw the Russian sol-
 
 188 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 diers and workmen who had not yet become 
 organized into a regular Red army, taking the 
 city of Kief in January, 1918, that a very ten- 
 der and beautiful tie had been broken between 
 me and the masses. These soldiers and work- 
 men were not thinking of the revolution. They 
 were moved only by a passion for victory. 
 They were not looking for comrades or 
 friends ; they saw only enemies and sought only 
 for revenge. They were filled with the lust to 
 kill. It was the spirit of war rampant among 
 them, the spirit that always is the same and 
 that is always abominable. This occurred dur- 
 ing the dark period of the revolution, the pe- 
 riod of Bolshevist terror. I do not think that 
 the leaders alone are to be blamed for this. 
 Many different factors brought us to the state 
 of despair, but I do think that the new Bolshe- 
 vist doctrines combined with the old methods 
 were largely responsible. That period has 
 apparently passed — I hope forever. The 
 Bolshevists have realized their dreadful 
 blunder. 
 
 The iron logic of history demands at times 
 an iron and bloody sacrifice, and in the day 
 when the Bolshevists came into power, and 
 when other political parties without armies and
 
 Lights and Shadows 189 
 
 without masses and adherents began their mis- 
 taken fight against Lenin and Trotzky, on that 
 day it was too late to prevent the terrible ex- 
 periences through which Russia has had to pass 
 during the last three years. The iron logic of 
 history brought no new visions to the minds of 
 the old theorist dialecticians, and, obedient to 
 traditional doctrines, they were as unable to see 
 the way for reconciliation as was the govern- 
 ment of Lenin and Trotzky to get rid of the 
 system of blood and iron. But there was a 
 time when it would not have been too late ; but 
 then the Bolshevist leaders were wanting in 
 comprehension, as were their political oppon- 
 ents who had lost their political status. 
 
 Shortly after Korniloff' s futile attempt at 
 rebelhon in September, 1917, many of the mod- 
 erate Socialists began to see clearly that there 
 could be no happy issue by cooperating with 
 the insincere and hesitating and unorganized 
 doctrinaire Russian bourgeoisie. Men like B. 
 Bogdanoff, the first secretary of the First Pet- 
 trograd Council, who was utterly pro-war and 
 pro- Ally, changed their minds and insisted on 
 the formation of a Socialist government with- 
 out representatives from the bourgeoisie. The 
 well-known follower of Plehkanoff, N. Zshor-
 
 190 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 denia, also a j)ro-war and pro-Ally man, a So- 
 cialist of the most moderate revisionist branch, 
 took a decisive stand against any coalition with 
 the bourgeoisie, and advocated a uniform So- 
 cialist government without Bolshevist repre- 
 sentatives. Kerensky found himself between 
 two fires. He, probably, realized that his ro- 
 mantic aspiration for national unity was very 
 far from becoming realized. I remember his 
 desperate remark, one day in September, "I do 
 not care who assumes power, Milyukoff or 
 Lenin, provided . . ." But he did not com- 
 plete the sentence. He saw that Russia was 
 collapsing politically and economically. He 
 knew better than did anyone else in Russia 
 that the Allies would never come to their aid, 
 and he feared a reaction and the restoration of 
 the Tsar which would assuredly take place with 
 a victorious Germany. And at that time Ger- 
 many was very powerful. At a secret confer- 
 ence of the Provisional Government, Teres- 
 chenko, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, 
 reported that the Allied armies would be ready 
 for a decisive attack in June, 1918. It was, 
 therefore, evident to Kerensky, that he would 
 have to wait for another year, and something 
 had to be done at once for consolidating the
 
 Lights and Shadows 191 
 
 national forces, and he would then be ready to 
 rely on the Left were the Right to betray the 
 nation. 
 
 But just at this juncture the real nature and 
 purpose of the Bolshevist leaders became clear. 
 They saw nothing but the acquisition of power. 
 It was, I must repeat, the result or the reflec- 
 tion of the general mind of the masses in whom 
 they believed blindly, for in their despair they 
 had but one thought — to gain power. 
 
 In September, 1917, Skobieleff, the Minis- 
 ter of Labor, related to me a conversation he 
 had had with Trotzky, his old teacher, when he 
 met for the first time after many years as a 
 political opponent. During his conversation 
 Skobieleff proposed, not quite oflicially, that a 
 Socialist government should be established 
 from which the bourgeoisie were to be ex- 
 cluded, and which should be responsible to the 
 Soviets until the Constituent Assembly con- 
 vened. What portfolios, he asked Trotzky, 
 would the Bolsheviki like to dispose of? 
 "None," answered Trotzky. "Why?" "You 
 will have to establish the Socialist Government 
 from among your own parties." "Will you 
 support us then?" asked Skobieleff. "We shall 
 see," was the reply. "What will be your atti-
 
 192 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tude in the meantime?" "We will watch and 
 criticize you." 
 
 It was found impossible either for the Social 
 Revolutionists party, which existed only in 
 name, or the Mensheviki to organize a govern- 
 ment. They were placed between the terrible 
 fires of the Russian bourgeoisie in alliance with 
 the Franco-English imperialism on the one 
 hand, and on the other, with the desperate 
 masses, tired of war, famishing with hunger, 
 disorganized economically and without politi- 
 cal stability. The great blunder of the Bolshe- 
 viki was identifying exceptional governmental 
 power with the social cause. It was this blun- 
 der which led inevitably to bloody and terrible 
 consequences. 
 
 I cannot help speculating as to what would 
 have happened had these parties come to an 
 agreement at that time. In the first place, we 
 
 should probably have had another Brest- 
 Litovsk. I mean a Brest-Litovsk for which 
 Russia would never have been blamed by the 
 Allies and Russia would not then have been 
 accused of being a traitor, and the Allies would 
 not have had the powerful slogan for their 
 propaganda. Russia's aspiration for freedom 
 would have been made clear before the world
 
 Lights and Shadows 193 
 
 as a genuine natural desire, and no one would 
 have said, as many did say, that a small group, 
 representing the will of the minority, had "be- 
 trayed the Allied democracies" by making 
 peace with Germany. As it is the Allied na- 
 tions have most skilfully used Lenin's inter- 
 national policy, not only against Bolshevism, 
 but against the Russian nation itself. 
 
 I am inclined to believe that given the har- 
 mony between the parties, before a Brest- 
 Litovsk treaty could or would have been 
 signed, the Allied governments would have 
 come to an agreement with Russia in 1917, 
 when it was not evident that Germany would 
 be defeated and when they still feared her. 
 The definite and energetic democratic interna- 
 tional program as formulated by Russia would 
 have had more influence than the written and 
 spoken but unaccomplished program of Presi- 
 dent Wilson or even the armies and airplanes 
 on the Western front. 
 
 Had President Wilson been supported by a 
 united Socialist Russia sitting at the same 
 table, I cannot imagine him failing at Ver- 
 sailles. Not one of the Allies would then have 
 been in a position to accuse Russia of being a 
 traitor or seeking only her own advantages.
 
 194 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 In France and in England the masses would 
 inevitably have been with Russia, and the 
 American delegates eventually would have 
 sided with her. Then, perhaps, neither Clem- 
 enceau nor Lloyd George would have had the 
 backing of his country. 
 
 Of course, all this is mere speculation. His- 
 tory, and especially history of a revolutionary 
 age, has its own logic and will. At such times 
 people are thinking only their own thoughts 
 and are guided by principles developed over a 
 long period of years. These thoughts and 
 principles they are unable to set aside at once, 
 more particularly in a time of such stress as a 
 revolution. It is Aot, therefore, to be wondered 
 at that few could see clearly at that time. The 
 Cadets wanted power and could not get it, but 
 they refused to give up their old principles. 
 The moderate Socialists did not want power 
 but were unable to get rid of it, and again be- 
 cause of their devotion to scholastic principles. 
 The natural outcome of this state of things was 
 the Bolsheviki, as they came, as they stood, and 
 as they remain to-day. Without Russia the 
 victories of the Allies became conquests. With- 
 out Russia, President Wilson's pronouncement 
 that the war was to be a war of neither victory
 
 LigJits and Shadows 195 
 
 nor defeat, remained but words. As it is, the 
 world is suffering under the dancing heels of 
 the victors, and is listening to the cries of the 
 suffering defeated. Without Russia as a true 
 revolutionaiy preacher of sincere democratic 
 ideals, victory has succeeded only in frightening 
 the blind mind of public opinion and in arrest- 
 ing the revolutionary spirit on all sides. This 
 victorious war, therefore, like every other vic- 
 torious war, has brought political and social 
 reaction, and Bolshevism is but a factor in- 
 creasing the intensity of the reaction. The 
 reaction is, as always, blind and suffers from 
 the bias of state prestige and state power ; but 
 had the Russian leaders adopted a cooperating 
 policy among themselves, this reactionary 
 debauch in which victorious Europe is now 
 mdulsrino; would have been far less acute and 
 desperate. 
 
 J am not asserting that the policy of the Bol- 
 sheviki as a governmental group was either 
 right or wrong, nor do I impugn their inter- 
 national tactics. WTien I speak of the Bolshe- 
 viki or Bolshevism I have in mind always a 
 political party embodying the philosophy of 
 power, with its aspiration for power and its 
 fallacy in believing that any program can be
 
 196 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 put into effect, by controlling the governmen- 
 tal machine. It is this Bolshevism with its 
 extremism which was the main cause of the 
 many difficulties within the Russian political 
 parties and the source of complications. But 
 from the day the Bolsheviki came into power 
 and Bolshevism ceased to be a mere aspiration 
 and became an influence and not a speculation, 
 from that day there was no possibility to stop 
 the further development of Russian events. 
 
 Despite its many theoretic and psychologi- 
 cal defects, it may still be said that the histori- 
 cal value of Bolshevism lies in the fact 
 that it has demonstrated clearly the fact 
 that the political democracy of which mod- 
 ern Europe is so proud does in no sense 
 include a social democracy. It has brought to 
 light also the further fact that the upheaval 
 and eruption of these late years were the con- 
 sequences of the reactionary background of 
 the last years of the nineteenth and the early 
 twentieth centuries. These consequences had 
 to come no matter at what cost; and Lenin, 
 the real spirit of the Russia of the last two 
 years, brought them to a head. 
 
 The future historian may, perhaps, see more 
 clearly and appreciate more fully the genius of
 
 Lights and Shadows 197 
 
 Lenin, for it required a genius to inspire an 
 impetus out of Europe's corruption. We, to- 
 day, are not placed, have not the right histori- 
 cal perspective. It is impossible to apply the 
 doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for 
 a tooth," and still maintain the final supreme 
 ideal of justice. To do this one must be a 
 Lenin — and there is but one Lenin. 
 
 But the masses are not Lenins, they have not 
 had his profound and remarkable revolution- 
 ary experience. And these masses, who have 
 been raised on the eye for an eye and tooth 
 for a tooth justice, have to be taken into ac- 
 count. The instincts born of this doctrine be- 
 come stronger and not weaker with them. 
 
 We must not forget also that the Bolsheviki, 
 because of the general conditions, were com- 
 pelled to introduce both military and indus- 
 trial compulsory conscription, and militarism 
 of any kind must poison the minds of the peo- 
 ple. Militarism may be necessary, but it can 
 never be good. Our civilization has accustomed 
 us to think in terms of constraint, violence and 
 revenge. It is a matter for profound regret 
 that new reformers and leaders cannot rise 
 above these old instincts and guide us in the 
 spirit of a humanitarian civilization. ^
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LIGHTS AND SHADOWS CONTINUED 
 
 After the fall of the Tsar I heard and read 
 so many expressions of sympathy for the Rus- 
 sian people and of hatred for Tsardom, both 
 from Europeans and Americans, that I got the 
 impression that the world really did know not 
 only what Tsardom meant but how it had dealt 
 with us Russians. But when I crossed the 
 Russian frontier I was, to put it mildly, not a 
 little surprised at the misunderstanding and 
 even ignorance which I found. 
 
 Much of this understanding I lay to the war, 
 in the violent heat of which people of Europe 
 became once more acquainted with things and 
 ideas which are absolutely incompatible with 
 even the most moderate principles of political 
 democracy. People became accustomed and 
 accepted without protest, the censorship, state 
 control, a restricted individual freedom, a blind 
 obedience to the supreme will of those who led 
 
 198
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 199 
 
 in the cause of "democratic justice and lib- 
 erty." 
 
 This restriction of their political freedom 
 caused them to forget their democratic free- 
 dom and prevented them from understanding 
 what Tsardom meant for us who had been, for 
 centuries, under the iron heel of censorship, 
 prisons, police jurisdiction, and the many 
 tyrannies of Tsarist officialdom. Our love of 
 freedom and our hatred of any political op- 
 pression, were, therefore, chiefly interpreted 
 not for what it truly meant, but for Bolshe- 
 vism. This new word with an old meaning is 
 used and misused now to characterize the most 
 noble and the most criminal; the most idealistic 
 and the most egoistic. All are alike thrown 
 together in one heap and labeled Bolshevist. 
 A species of fear psychosis seems to affect the 
 minds of the public. Many a time, since I left 
 my country and began to take part in the 
 political and social life of the rest of the world, 
 have I been reminded of those dark days of 
 Tsarism when not only freedom of speech and 
 political opinions were under the control of the 
 Tsar's policemen, but even one's aspirations 
 and dreams were shifted. The state of things 
 I found reminded me of the time when the
 
 200 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 famous writer, Gogol, wrote his wonderful 
 satirical novel, "Dead Souls," the book in which 
 he holds up to scorn the laz}% ignorant, stupid 
 and egoistic serf owners of his time. The cen- 
 sors forbade its publication and gave as a rea- 
 son for their action the following: "Christ said 
 that the human soul is immortal, therefore a 
 soul can never be dead, and therefore this book 
 is heretical." 
 
 These same censors — and many of them still 
 survive to-day — would erase from Russian 
 books such phrases as "bare truth." Truth in 
 the Russian language is feminine, and the cen- 
 sors asserted that the expression "bare truth" 
 was indecent. This spirit of the old Russian 
 censor is alive now in the twentieth century. 
 After a war of liberation it is still rampant not 
 only among government officials and in the 
 military headquarters, but in every home and 
 in every street. Let us emphasize ever so 
 slightly the meaning of the word "Liberty," 
 and we are immediately called a "Bolshevik" 
 or a "Red." This is the attitude which liberal 
 and radical thinkers describe as "political re- 
 action." By the conservatives it is accepted as 
 the expression of "the noble spirit of real citi- 
 zenship against anarchy." As a matter of fact
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 201 
 
 it is neither the one nor the other. It is simply 
 the after-effect of war, the terrible result of five 
 years of submission without criticism, without 
 light, and what is worse, without love. For 
 five years we have been steadily repeating the 
 words "Militarism," "Imperiahsm," "Prussian- 
 ism," and "Atrocities," and as a consequence, 
 we cannot get rid of the hatred that has been 
 engendered and fostered thereby, and we are 
 still feeling the complacent self-satisfaction 
 which we enjoyed during that period. The 
 human mind, so worked upon, must have an- 
 other object or another subject on which to 
 exercise its own unthinking, submissive and re- 
 actionary spirit. And it needs nothing definite 
 or positive; words, phrases, slogans will do. 
 Anything that is not in perfect agreement with 
 preconceived ideas and the existing order, 
 everything that expresses dissatisfaction with 
 stagnation and retrogression in "Bolshevism," 
 "Red," "Labor," "Democracy," "Industrial 
 Reconstruction," these are now fearful words, 
 and are anathematized as "Bolshevism." We 
 forget that things have changed in the world 
 during the last few years. Even so conserva- 
 tive a man as the President of the American 
 Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, whose
 
 i202 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 ideas are as far from Bolshevism as are Clem- 
 enceau's from international justice, stated be- 
 fore the Senate Committee which investigated 
 the steel strike, that democracy now means 
 something more than it meant formerly; that 
 democracy and justice have taken on new 
 meanings since the war. And there are people 
 who still think they mean less. 
 
 Even Samuel Gompers is conscious of the 
 increase in the intensity of meaning which in- 
 variably attends the decrease of the reality, 
 and the reality differs now very little from the 
 state of affairs which once existed in Russia, 
 when an individual felt himself always sur- 
 rounded by authority and autocratic powers, 
 by a selfish state with its open and secret spies 
 and by selfish statesmen ; a condition which re- 
 sulted in a perpetual moral depression. Dur- 
 ing these times the Russians employed an old 
 saying, that a human being consisted of a soul, 
 a body, a passport, and a collar, the latter serv- 
 ing as a handgrip for the policeman. The 
 political anatomy of a human being is the same 
 to-day as it was then. 
 
 But branding a man with a label affected 
 neither the soul nor the reasoning power of the 
 man so branded. It merely testified to the
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 203 
 
 stupidity of the individual who did the brand- 
 ing, the individual who was incapable of re- 
 ceiving criticism. It is pathetic to realize that 
 after years of blood spilling, we should have 
 lost the power to think critically, and are only 
 able to think in labels. Many values and many 
 ideals are smothered and often lost to the world 
 by this method, even though we elevate the high 
 position by calling it "public opinion." It was 
 this kind of public opinion that burned Lester 
 Ward's "Dynamic Society," when it confused 
 the word dynamic with dynamite. 
 
 The famous Russian sociologist and politi- 
 cal thinker, M. Kovalevski, had a similar expe- 
 rience on his return to Russia from abroad. 
 When he arrived at the frontier the Tsar's cus- 
 toms officer asked him: "Have you any books 
 on sociology? You know in Russia . . . soci- 
 ology . . ." 
 
 Such ignorance may be excused in the man 
 in the street, but when it is part of the politi- 
 cal system it is stark reaction, a reaction that 
 is the outcome of a debased egotism and of 
 individual autocracy in every phase of our so- 
 cial life. It goes without saying that such a 
 state of the social mind, educated, main- 
 tained, and developed by our modern state
 
 204 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 policy cannot make for fertility and growth, 
 and it can never be a foundation for new 
 social constructive achievements. Such a 
 state inevitably calls for fundamental changes, 
 which may be called Bolshevism, although 
 they may have nothing in common with 
 Bolshevism, and unless the changes are made 
 it will bring about Bolshevism in its most acute 
 and destructive form, as happened in Russia. 
 Nobody in old Russia, none of the old groups, 
 was willing to assent to an energetic recon- 
 struction of the new Russia. In the ascendant 
 were the selfish and self-satisfied advocates of 
 every state form of political and social doc- 
 trine. Any criticism or doubt of them was 
 construed in terms of heresy. Such a condition 
 could not be a point of departure toward crea- 
 tive construction. Reactionary indi\nduals and 
 groups of this kind could not continue in their 
 activities when a group more energetic, more 
 audacious, and less scrupulous in their adher- 
 ence to old traditions came into power. And 
 these were the Bolsheviki, or rather, such in- 
 dividuals as Lenin and Trotzky. Whether we 
 like or dislike the fact, we cannot help acknowl- 
 edging that these survived only because of their 
 real, abiding and consistent revolutionism. At
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 205 
 
 a time when all the remaining social groups 
 had proved themselves weak and inadequate, 
 no place was left on the historical stage for any 
 other type of creed and character. By an 
 ironic fatality of history, the most destructive 
 and the most intransigeant elements became the 
 most creative and the most stable of social 
 forces for Russia. Those who fear Bolshe- 
 vism, who disagree with it in principle and who 
 hate it in practice, must take into considera- 
 tion the terrible experiences of Russia and the 
 fatal lesson imparted by the Russian anti-Bol- 
 shevist forces. 
 
 It seems to me that we are living now in a 
 time when no false reservations should be main- 
 tained. Things must be called by their right 
 names and facts must be faced as we find them. 
 If we wish to escape Bolshevism, or rather if 
 we wish to fight it, we must first of all fight 
 ourselves; because Bolshevism is a demonstra- 
 tion by violent and suppressive methods of 
 what we were unable to do in the spirit of 
 cooperation and social unity, and of what oth- 
 ers were compelled to do after their own 
 fashion because we were weak and short- 
 sighted. The existence of Bolshevism is not 
 dangerous in itself, and does not threaten by its
 
 206 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 own innate vigor. It is dangerous because it 
 is a symptom of our own morbid spiritual 
 weakness. It is a warning of our approaching 
 death. That is what I felt shortly before I 
 left Russia, and what I felt more intensely 
 when I traveled through Europe. As the de- 
 velopment of events in Russia have shown, my 
 case is not an exceptional one. 
 
 Public opinion in Europe has now something 
 to learn from the lessons of the Russian anti- 
 Bolshevist shortsightedness. I remember two 
 episodes during the Bolshevist revolution. In 
 the halls of the Winter Palace a depressing 
 silence reigned. The place was empty of either 
 people or sentinels. Only a few loud voices 
 could be heard at the farther end of one of the 
 corridors. Two American newspaper men had 
 just come in and brought the news that the 
 telephone exchange in the telegraph building 
 was now in the hands of the Bolsheviki. In 
 one of the small rooms in a corner of the sec- 
 ond floor was gathered a group of five or six 
 men, prominent Socialist leaders, morally de- 
 feated, who were awaiting their physical down- 
 fall. Zinzinov, a member of the Central Com- 
 mittee of the Social Revolutionists and later a 
 Minister in the Ufa government, expelled from
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 207 
 
 Russia by Kolchak, took up the receiver and 
 called up the Central Committee of his party. 
 "Hello! Yes? That is all right." He spoke 
 in a quiet, reassuring tone. "They (the Bol- 
 sheviki) seem played out. They have already 
 lost their heads. Smolny (the headquarters of 
 the Soviets in Petrograd) has lost its ground. 
 I think that in the next few hours it will be all 
 right. Yes, surely, I will call up." 
 
 An hour later the Winter Palace fell into 
 the hands of the people who acted under the 
 direction of this same Smolny. 
 
 Two days later Petrograd, dark and suffer- 
 ing, was dripping from a continuous down- 
 pour of rain. The booming of guns in the 
 suburbs, the continuous rattle of machine guns, 
 which worked with the incessant precision of 
 sewing machines, filled the air. In the little 
 dirty headquarters of the Central Executive 
 Committee of Peasants stood a crowd of people 
 who had either come to fight or who had gath- 
 ered there because they had nowhere else to 
 go. In one corner a steady clack of conversa- 
 tion issued from a committee which was called 
 "The Committee of Salvation." From time 
 to time, a figure with red, sleepless eyes and a 
 bleak, determined face would emerge from the
 
 208 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 small, dark corridor which led to this room, 
 run through the main hall, and then scurry- 
 back again to this secret chamber of weakness 
 and despair. The former Minister of Labor, 
 Skobielev, hke the others, darted frequently in 
 and out. I stopped him. He smiled at me 
 strangely, and I asked him what was the mat- 
 ter. He was in a hurry, for they were all 
 hurrying in those days. "It is all right," he 
 answered, in a brave gay tone. "I thought that 
 they (the Bolsheviki) would maintain their 
 hold six or seven days. I did not expect them 
 to lose it in six or seven hours. The end is in 
 sight." 
 
 It is now about three years since I lis- 
 tened to this brief and hopeful prophecy, and 
 the six or seven hours still last. That is the 
 best demonstration of the shortsightedness 
 which is so sure that it sees all, and of the 
 weakness which considers itself able to fight 
 any force and to defeat any enemy. 
 
 The other episode I recall brings up to my 
 mind what strikes me as the most tragic expres- 
 sion I ever heard from the lips of an anti-Bol- 
 shevist leader in the course of the whole Bolshe- 
 vist revolution. On one of those miserable days 
 of bloodshed when certain Russian groups, led
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 209 
 
 by Allied officers, were conducting a fratricidal 
 struggle in the streets of Petrograd, I asked 
 N. D. Avksentieff (former Minister of the In- 
 terior under Kerensky), ""Wliat will happen? 
 What are they able to do?" "What," answered 
 Avksentieff, and his brows came together, 
 "what can happen when I am the strongest 
 among them?" 
 
 Somewhat too late he understood the value 
 of his sarcastic tribute to himself ! Yet he was 
 one of the prominent leaders of the largest 
 party of the Russian Revolution. Because 
 they were so numerous, because they were the 
 majoritj% they believed that they could be in- 
 transigeant doctrinaires ; that their devotion to 
 neat formulas and to precise principles suffi- 
 ciently guaranteed the stability of their social 
 order. They believed that their numbers 
 alone would keep them secure. History has 
 shown that they were mistaken — fatally mis- 
 taken. 
 
 The first day after the taking of the Winter 
 Palace, I happened to be in the Smolny Insti- 
 tute, at that time the headquarters of Trotzky. 
 Lenin had already returned to Petrograd 
 from his exile. His arrival at six in the morn- 
 ing had been kept secret from the people, be-
 
 210 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 cause, although Kerensky's government had 
 been overthrown conditions appeared so uncer- 
 tain that it was not considered safe for him to 
 appear before the people until noon. Trotzky 
 showed himself at one of the doorwaj^-s and 
 looked about, veiling his nervousness with a 
 seeming air of confidence. A man approached 
 ' and very soon a group of about thirty people 
 gathered about him. "Have you a Minister of 
 War?" asked the man. "Yes," was the an- 
 swer, and the characteristic Trotzky smile 
 broke through the dark cloud of his mustache 
 and beard. "Who is he?" "Verhofsky," 
 (Minister of War under Kerensky). "But 
 will he accept?" was the amazed question. The 
 smile disappeared, and a glint of cruelty shone 
 in Trotzky's eyes. "Of course he will," was 
 his answer, and he gripped his revolver in a 
 tightly clenched hand. 
 
 At the time this scene occurred my thoughts 
 were still in a confused state. The idealism of 
 Kerensky, the vague hopes for a Western 
 European democracy, which seemed to me then 
 much less hopeless than it appeared after I 
 had come face to face with it on the other side 
 of my country's frontier, the faith that even 
 our contemporary European heart was not ab-
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 211 
 
 solutely without feeling, the dread of the Ger- 
 man Kaiser, the eloquent formal pledges of 
 London and Paris, all these thoughts borne by 
 my mind in the noisy atmosphere of machine 
 guns, made me hate this face of Trotzky. I 
 questioned his assurance, because I did not see 
 at that time anything but the violence of it, 
 the cruelty of conquering power. Later I 
 understood that it was not Trotzky and not 
 his gun and not his smile which were import- 
 ant. What was important was the iron will 
 of the historical Nemesis. If people are de- 
 nied the sunlight of common love they will get 
 what they can by way of substitute from the 
 heat of violence. They will not at any rate be 
 content with the empty lamp of formal ideal- 
 ism. The inspiration of violence will take the 
 place that love would occupy in a solidarized 
 society. 
 
 That is what happened in Russia. And that 
 is why, little by little, right down to our own 
 days, all the weak, idealistic and futile social 
 elements came back, either openly or in disguise 
 to those who had overpowered them for the 
 "six or seven hours" which have lasted so 
 long. 
 
 JJnder the banner of patriotism many are di-
 
 212 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 rectly or indirectly supporting the Russian 
 Soviet Government in its fight against the 
 aggressive foreign intervention. Under the 
 banner of revolution many have ceased their 
 struggle against the Bolsheviki and have 
 doubled their fight against reaction. But it 
 means a surrender. Many of the old groups 
 and parties cannot allow themselves, because of 
 a sense of noblesse oblige, to go ahead sincerely 
 and to cooperate openly and frankly; but the 
 effect remains the same. 
 
 The Russian Revolution acquired signifi- 
 cance not because the Tsar was overthrown, 
 nor even primarily because of the tremendous 
 social experiment that was undertaken, but 
 chiefly because it demonstrated two things. 
 It exhibited, in the first place, the abilities and 
 disabilities of the modern European intellec- 
 tuals, with their hesitant philosophizing about 
 life, and their failure to breathe life into their 
 philosophy. And in the second place the revo- 
 lution showed how helpless and miserably self- 
 destructive is the state which puts its trust into 
 the formulae of a majority to carry out the 
 supremely valuable ideas of individual recon- 
 struction, and which thereby seeks to trans- 
 form the free human being, with a free will, a
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 213 
 
 free soul, and a free mind, into a thing com- 
 posed of a soul, a body, a passport, and a 
 collar. 
 
 All these elements were unable to accom- 
 plish any progressive or constructive work, so 
 that the abler came to impose their will, and 
 it is very doubtful whether Lenin and Trotzky 
 and the Bolsheviki are guilty in themselves of 
 their methods and instrumentalities. It seems 
 to me that the root of the question lies else- 
 where, that it may be traced to the idea that 
 political democracy is an ultima ratio, and to 
 the fact that with all its doctrines and theories 
 and conservative traditions, the modern state 
 and modern society did not create any other 
 alternative to the old methods of force, vio- 
 lence, and constraint, which are common alike 
 to the Bolsheviki and to their opponents. 
 Lenin did not fail to apply the tactics of the 
 old strategy, because the old order did not 
 teach anything else. It is proper to question 
 whether he is right from the point of view of 
 ultimate morals and ethics, and, frankly speak- 
 ing, that question is a difficult one to answer. 
 It may seem that he is not more, and there- 
 fore not less, right than were those who by 
 means of centralized militaristic organization
 
 214 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 aimed to crush the centrahzed Prussian mili- 
 tarism. 
 
 But still there is a difference, and it lies not 
 in the field of social ethics but in the field of 
 psychology. A race, a country, or a nation 
 fighting another race or country or nation be- 
 comes inevitably self-conscious and egoistic as 
 to its own values, and in place of the recently 
 destroyed militaristic ambition of the van- 
 quished enemy we have the new ambition of the 
 victor. Instead of Hindenburg we have Foch, 
 and instead of oppressed Galicia and Posen 
 we have an oppressed Egypt and banks of the 
 Rhine. But in a revolutionary struggle there 
 is no place for imperialism because a people in 
 revolution fight first of all against themselves. 
 That is the tragedy of it. The armies in a 
 revolution do not speak different languages, 
 nor do they wear different uniforms, unless 
 they are provided by foreign interference. 
 They are not proud of themselves. They are 
 destroying their own resources, the best repre- 
 sentatives of their own nation, their own cul- 
 ture. That, to a great extent, makes a differ- 
 ence between the use made by Lenin and Trot- 
 zky of the old methods, from the use made of 
 them by Hindenburg, Foch, and the rest, al-
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 215 
 
 though in form the methods cannot be distin- 
 guished at all. 
 
 There is one thing more to note about the 
 Russian Revolution. Since the French Revo- 
 lution we have been accustomed to compare all 
 new popular movements and struggles with the 
 experience of France from '69 to '93. And we 
 may feel rather skeptical about the outcome of 
 Leninism in Russia if we have in mind Robes- 
 pierre, Danton, and Marat, and the pohcy 
 which brought in Napoleon the First. But Na- 
 poleon the First was the result not of the 
 French Revolution, but of the Foreign Inter- 
 vention of Great Britain and Prussia. Again, 
 the French Revolution was only a transition 
 from feudal autocracy as represented by the 
 king, to a parliamentary democracy, and was 
 therefore only a political upheaval, despite the 
 new elements represented by the French peas- 
 antry. And parliamentary democracy, as we 
 have seen in the last war, does not prevent in- 
 ternational gambling and imperialist aggres- 
 sion. Therefore, once political democracy was 
 established it could continue even under Na- 
 poleon, and even in alliance with the Pope. 
 Politics were then, as they have always been, 
 unscrupulous, and admitted and even required
 
 216 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 cooperation and alliances wherever possible. 
 The Russian Revolution, on the contrary, and 
 especially that under the Soviets, was based 
 first of all on social motives and on uncondi- 
 tional pacifism. So that the Russian revolu- 
 tionary militarism is not even a by-product of 
 the Russian Revolution, but reflects the system 
 inspired in Europe and sharpened by Euro- 
 pean practices. 
 
 On the restless and dark surface of contem- 
 porary Europe Russia may be seen with a new 
 significance as the one spot where an idealistic 
 struggle was fought; wisely or unwisely, pure 
 or impure, it was nevertheless fought ; and amid 
 the darkness of a forest of bayonets she casts 
 the one ray of light. Is it a wonder that Rus- 
 sia produces so many academic Bolsheviks who 
 never dreamed of being Sovietists or even revo- 
 lutionists? The nation that dared to bare its 
 chest before the German bayonets, to present 
 its open suffering face in front of English and 
 French guns, how can we fear such a nation? 
 We must remember that the government which 
 holds it together is trying to realize a new 
 dream and a new ideal both of which come, per- 
 haps, only temporarily, but which must not be 
 extinguished if mankind aspires to creative and
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 217 
 
 progressive life instead of social stagnation and 
 smug individual complacency. 
 
 Maeterlinck some few years ago began his 
 search for the blue bird of happiness, and as he 
 could not find it under the guidance of the old 
 generations, he had to employ two children, 
 Tyltyl and Myltyl to aid him in the quest. 
 Wandering through this world and other 
 worlds, they could find nothing but the old 
 shades of their ancestors, and the old material 
 things — bread, milk, sugar. And when for a 
 while it seemed to them that they had cap- 
 tured the bird, it flew away again, very far 
 away, because the youthful dreams of the two 
 children were only dreams, and the blue bird 
 of justice, beauty, and happiness could not re- 
 main in the old worlds. We have now learned 
 that the old worlds must be made anew, and in 
 the remaking humanity is experiencing pain 
 and suffering, because there is no birth without 
 pain and suffering. 
 
 So noble and peace-loving a character as 
 the Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren, the Euro- 
 pean Walt Whitman, saw rebellion as an in- 
 spiring struggle of humanity for happiness. 
 He felt no regret at seeing crowds burning the 
 archives and destroying the old monuments.
 
 218 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 He saw these acts as signs of a new life, in a 
 new guise certainly, arising from the ashes of 
 the old. In the social stress and unrest of our 
 day we are facing the emergence of something 
 shadowed forth in the destructive and creative 
 dreams of Nietzsche. Russia is the first new 
 figure to emerge into the daylight of reality. 
 Since the time of Peter the Great she had as- 
 similated in her political and social body all 
 that was characteristic of Europe, and all that 
 was noble and creative in Russia. She is now 
 burning, not in a fire of her own making, but 
 in fires as of an auto-da-fe which European 
 blindness and ambition had encircled her. 
 That is her real position, and it is also her true 
 significance and value. It is her contribution 
 to the forces that will bring about the passing 
 of the old order in Europe. 
 
 Before it finally passes we cannot foretell 
 what further sacrifices this old order will de- 
 mand, both from Europe as a whole and from 
 Russia in particular. But this certainly we 
 may cling to. The old order is passing, and 
 whether Russia be made the victim of a twen- 
 tieth century European Inquisition or not, the 
 old Europe will no longer remain. When an
 
 Lights and Shadows — Continued 219 
 
 age is tottering down hill on its way to death, 
 it may crush many fresh lives in its clumsy 
 career, but it cannot halt its own final destruc- 
 tion.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONSEQUENCES AND POSSIBILITIES 
 
 We have now reached a point where we may 
 attempt to smnmarize, however briefly, the 
 conditions of present-day Europe and indi- 
 cate, however sketchily, the trend of its future 
 social and spiritual development. At the very 
 outset, however, we find ourselves confronted 
 with a capital difficulty. We need a new lan- 
 guage in which to express ourselves. The vo- 
 cabulary of political and social thought is clut- 
 tered with words which actually stand for lit- 
 tle more than the Baconian Idola. The greater 
 part of our traditional concepts have lost their 
 meaning for the present generation, and they 
 have either been narrowed by the specialist in- 
 vestigator or warped out of all useful shape by 
 the special pleader. The word Progress, for 
 example, is one of the more notorious Idola. 
 Whereas it is commonly used both by the 
 scholar and the popular speaker as though its 
 
 220
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 221 
 
 implications were so clear they needed no 
 further exposition, the fact of the matter is 
 that there is scarcely a thinker alive to-day who 
 could give a constructive definition of the word 
 which would be acceptable to the majority of 
 his contemporaries. "When a Russian writer 
 like Engelhart can write on "Progress as the 
 Development of Cruelty," we can easily see 
 how the word lends itself to specious and ma- 
 licious argumentation. 
 
 Now, what is commonly called progress 
 proves upon close examination to be some- 
 thing quite different. About the progress of 
 politics in the nineteenth century much has 
 been written. In the course of our survey I 
 have tried to make clear what this "progress" 
 meant in terms of the modern state. In real- 
 ity it came to little more than the idea of ex- 
 ploitation of the weak by those who are in 
 power, or by those who achieved power 
 through the operation of a clumsy constitu- 
 tional mechanism. This notion of exploita- 
 tion, in the interests of "progress" has been 
 duly dressed up in the garments of justice and 
 truth and liberty and what not, so that it 
 should seem to those who are governed that our 
 "progressive" institutions have actually created
 
 222 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 for them a more favorable condition of life. It 
 is characteristic of our modern civilization that 
 this feature of its political life should have 
 been judiciously formulated in Germany above 
 all other countries. For, as I explained in an 
 earlier chapter, the chief error of Germany was 
 to carry modern civilization rigorously to its 
 conclusions. It was no other than the German 
 philosopher Rudolph Eucken, of the Univer- 
 sity of Jena, who fifteen years ago came to the 
 conclusion that the individual who suffers in 
 modern society will necessarily try to find se- 
 curity and solace — and even self-expression — 
 in the state. This philosophj'', of course, was 
 utilized not so much to assist the individual as 
 to bolster up the authority of the state, and 
 in actual practice it served as well to justify 
 the arrogation of power by republican gov- 
 ernments as it did to strengthen the long- 
 established hold of the monarchies. The actual 
 behavior of this philosophy of state was far dif- 
 ferent from its philosophic assumptions. It 
 was not merely that the state failed to protect 
 the individual, to relieve his distress, to listen 
 to his aspirations. The state went so far as to 
 use him and exploit him for its own purposes. 
 The state took from him as much of his initia-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 223 
 
 tive and his productive value as it could use for 
 its bureaucracy and its military machine, and 
 it suppressed as far as possible all the rest of 
 his autonomous energies and activities. As 
 far as political development is concerned it is 
 plain that our boasted "progress" was only a 
 higher development of state power. It resulted 
 in a fallacious identification of individual dis- 
 positions with those of the government. Prog- 
 ress in this sense was the justification of things 
 as they were because they were. 
 
 Along that line no genuine movement for- 
 ward is possible. The new way out for which 
 we seek will not be discovered by following the 
 old way through. Did not Germany prove 
 that? 
 
 From the moral point of view the progres- 
 sive achievements of our age are equally il- 
 lusory. The movement toward international 
 pacification and humanitarianism with which 
 the twentieth century proclaimed its advent ap- 
 pears actually to have slipped backward from 
 the position it had reached in the days of Cob- 
 den and Bright. In our private life, in our 
 individual thinking, we may have been moved 
 by high moral sentiments and directed by noble 
 ideas, but as soon as we responded to the gladi-
 
 224 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 atorial call of the political and social arena 
 we stripped ourselves of our moral armor and 
 went forth to do battle as animals with no 
 other nature than a zoological one. Our mor- 
 ality was battered into uselessness by the strug- 
 gles of our public lives. In the sphere of 
 international and inter-human relations we 
 appeared as so many animals that had broken 
 out from the zoo. Morality was to us a cage 
 from which we had escaped. At large again, 
 we could enjoy an exquisite savagery which 
 carried us back farther than the Java man. 
 That was not the return to Nature which Rous- 
 seau pleaded for and Tolstoy practiced. These 
 great thinkers wished to escape what was wrong 
 in civilization. Our modern leaders wished 
 us to recover what was wrong even in savagery. 
 I have, of course, magnified our departure 
 from common moral standards, and I must 
 therefore hasten somewhat to qualify the pre- 
 ceding paragraph. I am not asserting that 
 we left no room anywhere for those moral 
 ideals which are the finest fruits of the creative 
 human mind. But I do say that we felt no 
 necessity for incorporating in our social and 
 political life the standards that we had firmly 
 established in theory, and partly carried out in
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 225 
 
 practice, for our individual lives. In the social 
 field we were content to remain "real" poli- 
 ticians and "practical" men. We sought not 
 the social good, but private privilege; not so- 
 cial achievement, but private satisfaction; not 
 social welfare, but private possession. This 
 kind of primitive "pragmatism" is the real 
 characteristic of what we call progress and ad- 
 vance. Our tendency to advance along these 
 lines recalls to me a line of Plato's to the ef- 
 fect that if life were to progress continuously 
 it would become unbearable. 
 
 What Plato may have meant by this enig- 
 matic sentence it is now impossible to say: its 
 meaning in our present situation, however, is 
 poignant. Beyond all doubt the progress of 
 Western European civilization has already 
 made life unbearable. At the risk of tedium 
 I must revert to the last war for illustration, 
 for I find in it a magnificent recapitulation of 
 our "progressive" accomplisliments. History, 
 indeed, has much to tell us from its many wars. 
 When Guy de Maupassant visited the desert 
 of Sahara and saw the wide stretch of golden 
 sand dotted here and there with little scarlet 
 flowers he exclaimed: ''Du sang et de Vor, 
 toute histoire humainer Blood and gold, the
 
 226 Tlie Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 whole history of humanity ! The twentieth cen- 
 tury is not different from the preceding cen- 
 turies in its selection of the materials of his- 
 tory: it uses the same ingredients and mixes 
 them in the same fashion. Indeed our century 
 has surpassed others, because of the scientific 
 resources which it was able to throw into the 
 scales. But those who think of Hannibal, 
 Caesar, Xerxes, Napoleon, and Moltke on one 
 hand, and of Socrates, Buddha, and Christ on 
 the other, will understand that the last war 
 was something more than a repetition of old 
 experiences. They will realize that continu- 
 ous progress has at last made life unbearable, 
 and has thus made the main task of our gen- 
 eration nothing less than a paradox. We can 
 achieve salvation to-day only by stopping prog- 
 ress ! We must stop it lest it bring us to ulti- 
 mate annihilation. 
 
 No part of the world has escaped from the 
 general hardship and suffering occasioned by 
 our last achievement in "progress." We can 
 no longer look to a new Columbus or Ponce 
 de Leon to discover for us new lands where 
 society may begin life afresh, for all the lands 
 are now not merely occupied but interrelated, 
 and the smallest village in Armenia, Turke-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 227 
 
 stan, or Siberia has shared something of the 
 terror and misery of our great debacle. INTo 
 virgin country, no undiscovered land, will give 
 us the inspiration for a fresh start. No stimu- 
 lus from an external environment will help us : 
 weakness, debilitation, and fatigue are every- 
 where. We must discover our new world from 
 within. We must put aside smug self-satis- 
 factions and a mean consciousness of "suc- 
 cess." We must pause to contemplate what we 
 have attained, not what we have obtained, what 
 we are, not what we possess. During the war 
 the great German pacifist, Foerster, whom I 
 have already quoted, used to tell us that the 
 peace which was to come (and unfortunately is 
 still to come) could not be won, but must be 
 merited. His words sounded then like the 
 banalities of a sermon, for we thought we could 
 win justice and truth and liberty by means of 
 our Realpolitik. We took it for granted that 
 these ideals would flower naturally once we 
 held the initiative in the world of power. But 
 Foerster was right. Our physical victory was 
 not enough: we were not able to achieve a 
 moral victory, and the nations that gathered at 
 Versailles could not arrange a peace, because 
 they did not deserve it.
 
 228 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 But it is not alone in politics and morals 
 that our progress has been deceptive. The 
 economic aspect of "progress" betrays equally- 
 gross anomalies. 
 
 Our economic life differs very little to-day 
 from what it was in the days of slavery or the 
 constitutional serfdom of the first half of the 
 nineteenth century. Our discoveries and in- 
 ventions in science have but aided to increase 
 the activity of the exploiters and enslavers. 
 The system may have changed its form, but 
 in essence it is the same. Prior to the intro- 
 duction of the steam engine and the telegraph, 
 we had slavery frankly accepted and openly 
 practiced. Domesticated human beings were 
 bought and sold like horses and cows ; they and 
 their progeny were bequeathed to unborn gen- 
 erations as property. We look back now on 
 that period as a dark age and congratulate 
 ourselves on the wonderful progress we have 
 made since that time, and we do not omit to 
 refer to the briefness of the period that has 
 elapsed, in order to emphasize the rapidity of 
 our progress. 
 
 But all the wonderful inventions and discov- 
 eries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 
 cannot compare with the discovery of the value
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 229 
 
 of a human being possessed with a dignity of 
 his own. And yet, in spite of the abohtion of 
 serfdom in Russia and the emancipation of 
 the negro in America — two events which 
 marked periods in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century — when we try to assess to-day the 
 dignity and value of a human being per se, 
 what do we find? We find that industrial de- 
 velopment and economic conditions have de- 
 based these values and enslaved the individual 
 just as they were debased and enslaved during 
 the previous two centuries. But with the sin- 
 gle difference, that whereas, formerly, human 
 bodies were enslaved for the value of their 
 muscles, because the dignity of a man with a 
 brain and a soul had not yet been discovered, 
 modern society has enslaved him for the new 
 values of his brain and soul. 
 
 The classification of human beings into 
 higher and lower, no longer obtains as it did 
 in our earlier period. But it still holds good 
 to-day in substance, as a basis of our social 
 life. It is not recognized by any constitution, 
 but it is part of an unwi-itten law. It is very 
 significant that at the Versailles Peace Con- 
 ference, a conference held at the end of the 
 second decade of the twentieth century, no one
 
 230 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 dared to make a frank declaration of human 
 equality; and the covenants of the conference 
 concerning labor are expressed in the vaguest 
 language possible. Even so conservative a 
 labor representative as Samuel Gompers de- 
 clared at the last convention of the American 
 Federation of Labor, that the labor classes in- 
 cluded in the Peace Treaty were very far from 
 expressing what the American representatives 
 of labor demanded officially in Paris. Were 
 we to read carefully the language of the peace 
 covenants affecting labor, we would be amazed 
 at its lack of recognition of human dignity, 
 and its implication of the wretchedness of hu- 
 man spirits. For we find there stated calmly 
 and as a matter of course, that labor is not a 
 matter of commercial speculation; that labor 
 cannot be bought or sold; that children shall 
 not be over-exploited and their young muscles 
 and brains weakened at the very earliest pe- 
 riod of their existence. Wliat an indictment of 
 our civilization ! But even agreeing that these 
 covenants of the Peace Treaty are sincere and 
 will be observed; assuming that the minds of 
 the old men at Versailles were really illumi- 
 nated for a moment with the light of justice 
 and moral principles, we still must be over-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 231 
 
 come by shame and a sense of degradation, that 
 in the century of dreadnaughts and aeroplanes, 
 in an age when our pride in civihzation rose to 
 its highest pitch, such decrees as these have to 
 be written at all. When the serfs were freed 
 a genuine rearrangement of the social forces 
 in Russia was made, and we really saw large 
 numbers of former slaves passing through the 
 narrow gates of society and the state. In these 
 days we try to get rid of the burden of modern 
 slavery by means of scraps of paper and diplo- 
 matic phrases, and we do not, in any way, en- 
 large our social field or change our economic 
 system. It is not a matter of the relations be- 
 tween the suffering and exploited slave major- 
 ity and the exploiting minority. It is simply 
 a matter of the value of life. What value can 
 life have when its basis is slavery, for those who 
 do not happen to be born into the family of a 
 factory owner? 
 
 The exploitation of human labor and the 
 growing power of capitalistic concentration, 
 gave play in the highest degree to what Ber- 
 trand Russell calls the possessive instincts. 
 This instinct for possession is more rampant in 
 the economic than it is in the political. 
 
 From the ethical standpoint our economic
 
 232 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 situation is a tragic failure. We have been 
 content to conduct our lives as though Christ 
 were merely a puppet of clericalism ; as though 
 ethics were but a university study which 
 should be pursued for the sake of a "passing 
 mark;" as though the distribution of vital 
 wealth and the establishment of human solid- 
 arity were of less consequence than the trans- 
 portation of freight and the regimentation of 
 workers and soldiers. Our morality itself is a 
 fetich, one of the Baconian Idola. We have 
 lost respect for its true meaning and have neg- 
 lected the necessity for maintaining its integ- 
 rity, and for our irreverence and neglect we 
 have had to pay a terrible penalty. Unless 
 we can recover the essential spirit of morality, 
 unless we can restore it to its rightful place 
 in our lives, our "civilization" will continue to 
 be a mockery, and our "progress" a burden. 
 In politics, in economics, in morality we have 
 decidedly reached an impasse. We cannot go 
 forward in the old direction without faring 
 worse. How shall we climb out of the ruins 
 that have fallen about us without creating 
 gi-eater ruin? How shall we contrive a new 
 alignment of social forces? With whom shall 
 we cooperate and to what end shall we work?
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 233 
 
 We must bear these questions constantly in 
 mind as we pursue our analysis of the present- 
 day structure of society. 
 
 First of all, let us ask ourselves whether there 
 is possibly any automatic escape from our 
 predicament. What is to be said for those 
 who believe that we can pin our hopes for 
 a new society on the probability of a gradual, 
 ameliorative evolution? The orthodox liberals 
 have always claimed to uphold the banners of 
 genuine progress, and their creed means that 
 in the long run progress is written in the nat- 
 ural order of things, and that whereas tem- 
 porary aberrations may deflect the movement 
 toward more perfect social institutions, the 
 tendency of our development must neverthe- 
 less be forward and upward. The liberals 
 believe that our civilization is in essence a good 
 one, and that it is the ultima ratio of human 
 activity as far as it has gone. They fear the 
 revolutionarj'^ method partly because it denies 
 the beneficence of the gradual processes of 
 change and partly because it is by nature catas- 
 trophic. They believe theoretically in a gen- 
 uine human solidarity; but unfortunately when 
 this liberal shibboleth is translated into politi- 
 cal language it means little more than a
 
 234 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 readiness for compromise. Morally speaking, 
 liberal solidarity implies a temporary acquies- 
 cence in the evils of our times for the sake of 
 a possible realization, at some future date, of 
 justice and liberty. Traditional liberalism has 
 stood theoretically for the humanities : that has 
 
 ft/ 
 
 been its positive position. At the same time it 
 has "stood for" (in the sense that it has toler- 
 ated) a good portion of the inhumanities. 
 Lord Morley's ineff ectualness, as Secretary for 
 India, in stopping the outrages upon liberal 
 principles practiced by his subordinates is an 
 excellent example of liberalism in both capaci- 
 ties. Traditional liberalism has, in point of 
 fact, tended always to weaken the creative, as 
 well as the destructive, elements of life. It 
 has achieved a sort of deadly success in pal- 
 liating the egoistic and ruthless aspects of 
 upper class capitalism and in decently cover- 
 ing up the misery and depression of the lower 
 strata — veiling the whole scheme of naked ex- 
 ploitation in the robes of "historic necessity," 
 "give and take," and "abolition of violence." 
 On the surface liberalism has been the only 
 philosophy of contemporary political thought 
 which was free from the egoism of the two con- 
 flicting classes ; it appeared to be the only one
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 235 
 
 based upon such considerations as moral order, 
 justice, and peaceful development. It has been 
 the hesitancy of liberalism to follow a frank, 
 clear-cut, forthright policy in practice that has 
 brought about its failure. The result of this 
 failure is not merely that liberal methods have 
 been discredited but that support has been 
 given to the fallacious notion that ethical prin- 
 ciples themselves are of little moment in the 
 practical conduct of political and social life. 
 In consequence the discontented classes, ob- 
 serving the failure of liberalism, have taken 
 up the idea of dictatorial power. That is the 
 most obvious outcome of the debacle of liberal- 
 ism, and by all odds it is the most important. 
 The responsibility for the acceptance of Bol- 
 shevism by the proletariat throughout the 
 world is attached to this failure. 
 
 With liberalism unseated, reaction is in the 
 saddle, and the methods of reaction are domi- 
 nant even in political camps where its aims are 
 suspected. There has, in fact, taken place a 
 strange interchange of methods between the 
 radical and the reactionary. While the aims 
 and final ideals of radicalism carry with them 
 the breath of a new life, and the vision of a 
 new human unity, the instruments used to
 
 236 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 make them effective are theoretically, and as 
 the Russian Revolution bears witness, practi- 
 cally, the same methods that have been em- 
 ployed by all the governments of the world. 
 Now, these aims will never bring about a gen- 
 uine revolution. The great revolution will 
 come only when violent methods are repudia- 
 ted and the same results are achieved by meth- 
 ods which are in themselves consonant with the 
 purposes of the revolution. The discovery of 
 this new path to a revolutionary goal will be 
 a real revolution indeed! Without it, all our 
 attempts are spurious. 
 
 Let us ask ourselves candidly whether a 
 violent upheaval is the only way out of the 
 present impasse, now that the failure of liberal- 
 ism is acknowledged beyond dispute. If we 
 are to make a successful appraisal of the pos- 
 sibilities for revolution we must at the outset 
 make a discrimination between two kinds of 
 social movement which we call by the same 
 name. One kind of revolution is purely politi- 
 cal: its ideals are republican, or rather, par- 
 liamentary; the other kind is industrial: its 
 prime purpose is to achieve economic freedom. 
 The Russian Revolution was so effective so- 
 cially and industrially because it was not ham-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 237 
 
 pered by established pseudo-democratic insti- 
 tutions and because it did not make the 
 attainment of such institutions its goal. Rus- 
 sia, as is notorious, did not possess a parlia- 
 ment; above all things, Russia did not possess 
 a parliamentary tradition. As an American 
 once defined it, Russia was a parliamentary 
 monarchy with an autocratic monarch. The 
 Russian Revolution accordingly had no diffi- 
 culty in assuming a social form; for the forces 
 of the revolution flowed naturally into social, 
 rather than political channels. Its violent and 
 drastic quality was therefore, in certain aspects, 
 the natural outburst of forces which had not 
 spent their energy in meandering through the 
 fields of conventional politics. This accounts 
 in part for the impetus of the Soviet idea. 
 
 The case with France and England is quite 
 different, and even a cursory survey will con- 
 vince one that a violent revolution is little short 
 of an impossibility in either country. The in- 
 direct, parliamentary tradition is too well-de- 
 veloped, and the spontaneous ebullition of 
 social forces, such as took place in Russia, 
 would speedily dissipate itself if indeed it could 
 ever burst forth. With Italy the case is not so 
 clear, because the proletarian movement on
 
 238 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 one hand, and the chauvinist movement on the 
 other, have both to some extent repudiated the 
 authority of the monarchy and of parhament; 
 and in the struggle between these two distinct 
 and antagonistic sections of the body poHtic 
 the conservative poHtical institutions may sud- 
 denly collapse. England and France, how- 
 ever, have developed parliamentarianism and 
 state unity to such an extent that a revolution 
 seems altogether out of the question. The quar- 
 rel between the parliamentarians and the So- 
 vietists within the ranks of the proletarians is in 
 itself disruptive of any solid movement toward 
 revolution. Another factor which will prevent 
 revolution in Western Europe is the strength 
 and influence of the middle classes. The social 
 classes within the modern western states are 
 not split into two plainly opposed camps as 
 was the case in the last Russian and the first 
 French Revolution. In modern Europe the 
 middle classes serve as ballast which keeps the 
 ship of state upright in a storm ; and so long 
 as they do not shift when the ship is keeling 
 over no upset will take place. The position of 
 the Russian middle class was anomalous. Be- 
 cause of the economic oppression of Tsardom 
 the middle class in Russia had become revolu-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 239 
 
 tionary in temper, and accordingly the first 
 steps taken toward revolution by the prole- 
 tarians were aided and encouraged by the mid- 
 dle class, which cooperated freely in the first 
 revolution, at least in its early stages. The 
 other reason that the middle class counted for 
 so little in maintaining the old order was that 
 they were numerically weak. More than sev- 
 enty per cent of Russia's population were peas- 
 ants and workers, and as soon as the revolution 
 was under way its direction remained in the 
 hands of this majority. The unorganized 
 bourgeoisie had not ballasted the old regime; 
 and they could scarcely produce an effect upon 
 the new order. 
 
 The place of the middle class in Western 
 Europe is vastly more important than that it 
 occupied in Russia. Socially inactive and eco- 
 nomically conservative, the middle class repre- 
 sents that large part of the population which 
 rejoices in these characteristics, and the ideas 
 which it stands for above all others are those 
 of order and peace. It is this middle class that 
 is the true product of our so-called progress 
 and our so-called civilization in Europe. It is 
 the dead center of our whole social system. So- 
 cially it is the medium in which the yeast of
 
 240 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 capitalism is introduced, for the ultimate leav- 
 ening of the whole social order. The middle 
 class has been educated into the belief that 
 possession and property are the final goals of 
 human effort, and that happiness, as well as 
 the highest social good, consists in the exten- 
 sion of one's possessions and the sanctification 
 of one's property. Admission to the capitalist 
 class is believed by the bourgeoisie to be the 
 crown of human achievement, while reduction 
 to the level of the working class is regarded as 
 a catastrophe so dreadful that no scruple, no 
 sense of humanity, no love of justice, must 
 stand in the way of avoiding it. So implicitly 
 has the middle class come to believe in these 
 socially inimical doctrines that the reign of 
 the middle class is the real terror of our mod- 
 ern culture, and the most pernicious force that 
 has worked, and is working, for the degrada- 
 tion of society. The great enemy of a genuine 
 revolution is not Capitalism itself, but its by- 
 product, its bastard offspring, the middle class ; 
 and as long as the middle class remains intact 
 in Europe a revolution is not possible. 
 
 It is worth while to pause for a second and 
 reckon a little more fully with the influence of 
 the middle class and with the standards it has
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 241 
 
 erected; for it would be as foolish to lay out 
 a plan for reconstruction which neglected the 
 middle class as it would be to lay out the plans 
 for a new city and neglect the swamp which 
 stood undrained in the midst of it. The very 
 nature of our plans must be altered so that we 
 may without unnecessary effort abate such a 
 nuisance. The ideals of the middle class all 
 grow out of the belief that the good life con- 
 sists simply in following pleasure and avoid- 
 ing pain, and that the chief means of achieving 
 this happy state is by satisfying the possessive 
 instincts to the utmost, just as though the high- 
 est kind of organic life were represented by the 
 sort of creature that fastens itself to a shel- 
 tered rock in the ocean and by avoiding the 
 risks and dangers of an active life grows pro- 
 gressively fatter and more comfortable and 
 more replete with physical satisfaction until at 
 last it has become simply a mouth and a food 
 pouch. To rise above the level of this fixed, 
 sessile, comfortable, and thoroughly degraded 
 mode of existence is no part of the mission of 
 the middle class. Social stability, with its 
 ensurance of an unchallenged position and a 
 regular income, is all that the middle class 
 seeks to maintain, and it sets its back firmly
 
 242 Tlie Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 against every movement which challenges its 
 existence or which threatens to remove the con- 
 ventional foundations upon which it rests. 
 Conformity and uniformity are its ideals. To 
 comply with middle-class standards, in other 
 words, and to extend this habit of compliance 
 to as large a section of the population as can 
 be reached, are the chief ends of a bourgeois 
 civilization. 
 
 Materialism demonstrated a certain diabolic 
 genius in creating its faithful servant, the mid- 
 dle class. The influence of our materialistic 
 ministers of progress is now more potent by 
 far than that of our idealistic dreamers, and it 
 is a fine irony that the first should be called 
 the upholders of law and order and the second 
 the apostles of violence. Spiritual violence — 
 the ruthless suppression of every benevolent in- 
 stinct — is the very soul of bourgeois culture. 
 The rule of the middle class is nothing less than 
 a "dictatorship of the propertariat." While 
 that dictature lasts the new order of society will 
 remain unborn. 
 
 Now in the face of the increasing moral au- 
 thority and material power of the working 
 classes, the proletariat attempted to escape 
 the menace from within the state by creat-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 243 
 
 ing a host of new menaces outside the state. 
 It sought to achieve this end by appropri- 
 ating the democratic slogan of national self- 
 determination and turning it to its own 
 especial uses! Thus was one of the most dread- 
 ful crimes in history lately committed. A sin- 
 gle glance at the new map of Europe will 
 amply illustrate its details. It should have 
 been clear to everyone, even to the "mean, sen- 
 sual man," that the war to end war was 
 destined to usher in a new era. W^at the 
 characteristics of that era were to be was some- 
 thing whose determination rested to no slight 
 extent on the terms of peace and the sort of 
 economic and social conditions that accompan- 
 ied them. The choice lay roughly between 
 three roads. On one side lay the road that 
 continued us along the lines of the old order: 
 that was the road of reaction. On the other 
 side stretched the road that would have led us 
 in a new direction under the same motive 
 power that brought us to an impasse on the 
 first road: this was the path of violent revolu- 
 tion. Between them opened the third alter- 
 native ; the road that would have led us toward 
 a revolutionary goal through the instrumen- 
 tality of socially renovated and morally solid-
 
 244 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 arized society. From the second road the 
 propertariat drew back in hysterical horror. 
 The third possibihty it turned aside from, 
 partly in ignorance, partly in sloth, and partly 
 because it made demands incompatible with the 
 continuance of the system of privilege and 
 property upon which the bourgeoisie rested. 
 The propertariat chose the worst road of all, 
 that which had led us into the great war, and 
 which had in the course of five bitter years 
 accentuated every evil that existed in the old 
 political system. It was not for lack of warn- 
 ing that the representatives of the old order 
 played fast and loose with the principle of self- 
 determination. In the first days of November, 
 1918, Karl Kautsky, dean of European social- 
 ist intellectuals, published a series of articles 
 analyzing the strategical and economic situa- 
 tion in some of the new countries. He pointed 
 out incidentally that such a country as Czecho- 
 slovakia, in the heart of Central Europe, would 
 furnish one of the greatest incentives for a 
 new war. Surrounded by Germany, Poland, 
 and Austria, with only a narrow lane of com- 
 munication between its two parts, Czecho- 
 slovakia could easily be cut in twain during 
 the first hour of a national conflict. It would
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 245 
 
 be unable from a strategical point of view to 
 defend itself, and this situation would be a 
 constant temptation to her neighbors to as- 
 sume an aggressive attitude toward her. No- 
 body would fear her, but she would fear 
 everybody. She would be afraid of her ability 
 to maintain her national independence, eco- 
 nomically and strategically. In short, Czecho- 
 slovakia threatens to be a perpetual sore-spot 
 in Europe, and only a statesmanship that 
 placed the dangers of national warfare lower 
 in the scale than the dangers of class conflict 
 would ever have gone to the lengths of creating 
 an independent entity out of a country whose 
 position as a state is so indefensible. The 
 necessity such a small state finds in having to 
 lean upon a larger one, as Poland is supposed 
 to lean upon France, is the principle character- 
 istic of this diplomatic arrangement, and it is 
 a characteristic which, while it will redound to 
 the financial and military benefit of the greater 
 power, will do nothing to further the peace of 
 Europe or the prosperity of the underlying 
 populations. 
 
 The specious way in which the principle of 
 self-determination was employed by the Great 
 Powers is nowhere more evident than in the
 
 246 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 case of Austria, and this demonstrates to the 
 hilt the faults of the bourgeois peace. What 
 respect can the Austrian working class have 
 for the established order when, despite their 
 demand for unity with Germany, the "princi- 
 ple of self-determination" is invoked in order 
 to make them work out their salvation in ster- 
 ile independence. With an industrial life 
 mainly dependent upon the Czechs, among 
 whom the chief industries of the old Austro- 
 Hungarian empire were concentrated, and de- 
 pendent mainly upon Hungary and Galicia 
 for supplies, the working classes of Austria are 
 inevitably bound to be a negligible quantity 
 in the future. The industrial life of Hun- 
 gary, although somewhat more developed 
 through war activities, is likewise not strong 
 enough to maintain that country in independ- 
 ence, and Hungary will be compelled to "co- 
 operate" with those Great Powers whose secret 
 covenants will have all the force of public laws. 
 Unless an internal victory of democracy is 
 achieved in the belligerently victorious coun- 
 tries all the small nations of central Europe — 
 to say nothing of the Near East — will be 
 merely colonies of the Great Powers, whether 
 avowedly or in disguise. Hungary is an in-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 247 
 
 stance of the way in which the map of Europe 
 will be withdrawn on a moment's notice. The 
 small states are but little nuclei which may be 
 crushed out in a moment. The Balkan States 
 have been multiplied by the peace settlement, 
 and by that fact the number of international 
 danger points have been correspondingly in- 
 creased. The war has indeed Balkanized Eu- 
 rope. In this condition it is a rich field for 
 the selfish appetites for conquest and aggran- 
 dizement and exploitation which are whetted in 
 the capitals of Europe. Is this not the most 
 startling exhibition of Bolshevism that the 
 world has been confronted with? Bolshevism 
 perpetrated in the name of "law and order" is 
 no less Bolshevism than when it is practiced 
 in the name of renovated social order. Is a 
 crime any the less flagrant because it is com- 
 mitted in evening dress ? 
 
 It is unfortunate, however, that disillu- 
 sionment with the principle of nationality 
 should have gone so far. The explanation 
 for our cvnical aversion to nationalism lies, 
 of course, in the Bolshevism of Downing 
 Street and the Quai d'Orsay. The interna- 
 tional dictators at Versailles did not differ in 
 method from that British Foreign Secretary
 
 248 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 who, a few hundred years ago, sat in his of- 
 fice, surrounded by his assistants, calculating 
 as a matter of pure arithmetic how many black 
 people could be transported from Africa and 
 sold into slavery in the American colonies. 
 The "big three" used fine-sounding terms, 
 taken impudently from science, morals, and 
 religion, to justify their establishment of a 
 ruthless system of white slavery over a great 
 part of Europe and Asia : but their underlying 
 purpose was as base as that which was the 
 mainspring of black slavery, for they were con- 
 cerned, it would seem, only with the import- 
 ance of so carving up the new states that their 
 peoples would inevitably quarrel with their 
 neighbors across the frontiers and so forget 
 those who were their real masters and owners. 
 The old abominable principle. Divide and 
 Rule, was written in almost every clause of 
 the peace treaty. Even a dictatorship of the 
 proletariat will hardly break down the pro- 
 visions that were made under this dispensation, 
 and instead of working toward new issues the 
 proletariat is likely to drench the old issues in 
 blood — to the great joy of those who make it 
 their business to divide and rule. 
 
 The prejudice against nationalism is, I say.
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 249 
 
 an almost inevitable reaction against the way 
 nationalism was used by the big powers to pro- 
 mote imperial interests. There exists a feeling 
 that nationalism is a strongly disruptive fac- 
 tor; that nationalism and internationalism are 
 conflicting and irreconcilable forces; and that 
 no real harmony may be expected until one or 
 the other of them is overthrown. The spokes- 
 men of bourgeois democracy claim to be dyed- 
 in-the-wool nationalists: above all things they 
 hold themselves patriots. Therefore these 
 elder statesmen and their followers assert the 
 right to crush radicalism, and they go so far 
 as to make nationalism itself synonymous with 
 anti-radicalism and internationalism with radi- 
 calism, so that the obligation is imposed upon 
 every patriot to crush the two latter "isms" at 
 a single blow. This identification of national- 
 ism with the forces of reaction is popular not 
 merely among the reactionaries themselves but 
 also to some extent with the liberals. It seems 
 to many radicals, liberals, and Socialists im- 
 possible to reconcile their plans for the devel- 
 opment of a sound economic and social world 
 order with the demands of national culture. I 
 believe that both the reactionaries and the radi- 
 cals that are committed to this point of view
 
 250 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 are mistaken; although the reactionaries have 
 utihzed the error to serve their special politi- 
 cal and economic interests, whereas the radicals 
 have nothing to gain by blinding themselves to 
 the true position of things. Beyond doubt the 
 sort of nationalism that was provoked by the 
 war is antagonistic to internationalism : indeed 
 it is inimical to any generous scheme of human 
 culture. What was called nationalism during 
 the war period was nothing more than the bare 
 expression of our brute instincts: fear and 
 anger and self-assertion and the impulse to 
 stampede with the herd were its chief ingredi- 
 ents. When the national combat ceased, how- 
 ever, and civil strife took the place of military 
 strife the finer aspect of nationalism came to 
 the surface, and as I have already noted in 
 the Chapter on Revolution it was those very 
 groups that were committed to a thorough- 
 going international working-class program that 
 proved staunchest to the ideals of a genuine 
 nationalism. Even during the war in Russia 
 treason against the country was confined to 
 the highest circles of the court, and the most 
 pro-German elements were those who were os- 
 tensibly most pro-Russian. And during the 
 critical period of the revolution the case be-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 251 
 
 came even more plain. It was the Russian 
 radical that showed himself the nationalist; it 
 was the patriotic Cadet that deserted Keren- 
 sky when his government was toppling, and it 
 was the bourgeoisie that was prepared to sacri- 
 fice his country's welfare with the aid of mili- 
 tary forces from England and France. Again, 
 when Hungary had to be saved and her na- 
 tional independence protected from the vora- 
 cious, appetites of the statesmen at Versailles 
 and their Balkan agents. Count Karolyi was 
 helpless and gave up his power to the extreme 
 internationalists, led by Bela Kun. If one 
 compares the messages of Bela Kun to Lenin 
 and to the Supreme Council at Versailles with 
 the diplomatic notes sent by Clemenceau to 
 Germany or the brutal reply to Germanj'^ about 
 the liberation of her war prisoners one cannot 
 doubt which of the two is more deeply imbued 
 with the spirit of cooperation based upon na- 
 tional dignity. Bela Kun speaks in the mood 
 of a temperate and humane nationalist ; Clem- 
 enceau in that of a bellicose and aggressive 
 imperialist. There is no reason either in logic 
 or history, as far as I can see, which should 
 cause the radical to fear striking root in the 
 deepest national soil; it is out of the proper
 
 252 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 cultivation of our several national cultures that 
 a true internationalism will eventually flower. 
 Official nationalism, with its ruthless competi- 
 tion, its widespread exploitation of resources, 
 its centralized financial control, its disregard of 
 any end except profit, is the disintegrating 
 force against which the true nationalist must 
 fight, and in the endeavor to curb international 
 capitalism the radical can perform a service 
 both to the cause he openly loves — that of hu- 
 mane internationalism — and to the cause he 
 still distrusts, that of nationalism. The present 
 alignment of forces is misleading and destruc- 
 tive of effort, and a new alignment must as soon ' 
 as possible be effected. 
 
 How shall we escape from the maelstrom of 
 our time? The values we have created in cul- 
 ture and science, the Yery lives of peoples and 
 nations, are in danger, and unless we can find 
 succour our whole civilization is in danger of 
 going under. There seems no other recourse 
 but to throw the lines to labor. We must put 
 our trust in those groups which have no long 
 tradition of hatred, chicanery, double-dealing, 
 and diplomatic fraud, and which have, on the 
 contrary, a distinct personal realization of the 
 unbearableness of suppression and violence.
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 253 
 
 The suppressed but not smothered voice of 
 labor is the only one that has a right to be 
 heard in the present crisis. It is the only- 
 group that is potentially capable of making a 
 creative contribution to the problems of world 
 reconstruction. In admitting this we are not 
 following the doctrinaire counsels of Lenin and 
 Trotzky. The modern capitalist himself feels 
 the force of this new social element. The idea 
 of reconstruction was born first of all within 
 the ranks of the economic experts and business 
 men of Europe. These gentlemen even went 
 so far as to give labor an opportunity to func- 
 tion under the auspices of the League of Gov- 
 ernments. They were ready to listen to the 
 voice of labor in the halls of the future League. 
 What this benevolent interest in the labor 
 movement means when reckoned up in terms of 
 tangible assets and goods it is a little difficult 
 to discern. The old men at Versailles, being 
 experts at abusing words and perverting their 
 meanings, as their treatment of the principle 
 of national self-determination so violently wit- 
 nesses, reduced the ideas of reconstruction and 
 labor participation to facts which bore no re- 
 semblance to their original features. They 
 could hardly be expected to do otherwise, for
 
 254 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 they went so far as to abuse the words Christ 
 uttered when he walked, lonely and sad, in the 
 mountains and over the desert of Judea, suf- 
 fering with his people, crushed as they were 
 under the iron heel of the Roman Empire ; and 
 seeing no way out in the theories of life as pre- 
 sented by the Pharisees, he discovered anew light 
 in a new life somewhere else. He thought that 
 unless we were all enlightened by the same God 
 who was in us and around us, and not en- 
 throned somewhere in a hidden heaven, there 
 was no use in shouting and in political cam- 
 paigns; and so he said: "Render unto Csesar 
 the things that are Csesar's, and unto God the 
 things that are God's." These words were 
 used, as were many other words of Christ, as 
 a justification for the Cassars of this world who 
 considered all things theirs. Submit to the 
 power of the Caesars and become slaves in the 
 name of God ! 
 
 Labor will, no doubt, be given a seat in the 
 diplomatic councils. In the parliaments, too, 
 a place will be cleared for it. For without 
 labor it will be impossible to utilize expediti- 
 ously for military purposes the workers who 
 are sent to "give help, financially, economic- 
 ally, and politically, to the weak and small na-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 255 
 
 tions" through the simple diplomatic method of 
 wrecking the financial system of the succoured 
 country and breaking down its political struc- 
 ture. The ruling classes, since they cannot 
 govern without the assistance of labor, are con- 
 centrating their energies now on the problem 
 of turning this situation to their own advan- 
 tage. They are willing to put the strings of 
 authority into labor's hands as long as they are 
 able to control the hands. How could they 
 assume any other attitude toward labor when 
 for a hundred years our whole thought on the 
 subject had been based on such humanly in- 
 sufficient ideas as those of efficiency and pro- 
 duction ? According to the regnant philosophy 
 the laboring man was a cow, and his value was 
 the amount of milk he produced. The hospi- 
 tals, the social welfare organizations, the 
 amusements that were provided for labor were 
 all aimed at helping the workman — to workT 
 But the laboring man is neither a cow nor a 
 machine. He is something more. And no sys- 
 tem of society will be tolerable until it realizes 
 that this "something more" is its whole excuse 
 for existing. 
 
 What is really valuable, for instance, in the 
 Russian peasant, or the Russian workman on
 
 256 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 the banks of the Volga? The amount of mus- 
 cular energy he possesses, or the Maxim Gorky 
 who emerged so suddenly from the dark 
 masses of that people ? And how many Maxim 
 Gorkys are lost throughout the world on the 
 banks of rivers and in the power rooms of fac- 
 tories! Neither the spiritual nor the ethical 
 energy of a man is taken into consideration 
 now when we say labor. The sin is not limited, 
 we have to confess, to those who are professedly 
 at one with capitalism. It is characteristic of 
 many labor leaders who think in terms of 
 Marxian materialism. The ethical value of 
 labor is forgotten. The human value of what 
 is produced by a man has been overlooked and 
 our life has become so materialistic, the con- 
 tent of it has been deprived to such a large ex- 
 tent of moral values, that we have begun to 
 think that no moral values exist. But the 
 Nemesis of history has never slept, and we are 
 reminded of it in a cruel way, by wars and revo- 
 lutions and Bolshevisms. 
 
 The need for reconstruction is universally 
 acknowledged. Nobody denies that a funda- 
 mental remodelling of our economic and indus- 
 trial system is part of the order of the day, but 
 in all the prolix discussions of reconstruction
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 257 
 
 no one seems concerned with analyzing the rea- 
 sons that underhe this need. It is generally- 
 admitted that the war has cost too much, that 
 the disorganization of our industrial system has 
 gone too far, and that a more effective social 
 order must be established. While no oh j ections 
 can be offered against this view I must never- 
 theless insist that the most important thing is 
 to ascertain what reconstruction means and 
 what should be its immediate aim. The res- 
 toration of the wealth of nations which was 
 destroyed on the battlefields of Europe is no 
 adequate goal of achievement. If reconstruc- 
 tion means the reorganization of production so 
 that we may relapse into the old ways and 
 continue in our "normal" life — and during the 
 last few years war became almost a normal 
 attribute of our life — then we had better not 
 have any reconstruction and our every-day 
 needs had better increase and our resources de- 
 crease until we have a general enough collapse 
 to stop the reign of blood. But we are not apt 
 to acknowledge that we desire reconstruction in 
 order to ensure our ability to carry on more 
 wars. 
 
 It is necessary now to remake the world for 
 two reasons. First, to bring into the active
 
 258 Tlie Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 political life of society new elements and new 
 members who, if they do not possess the train- 
 ing of the old statesmen, do possess the compre- 
 hension of suffering and the understanding of 
 what present-day society is and what no so- 
 ciety should be. Second, in order to solidarize 
 the hitherto conflicting groups in such a way 
 that the possibility of continuing wars and of 
 engendering new ones will be reduced to a mini- 
 mum, if not destroyed. 
 
 Now it is little better than a truism to say 
 that no work of reconstruction is possible with- 
 out real political freedom, real democracy, and 
 not the democracy about which so much has 
 been written and of which so little has been seen 
 and felt. But political democracy now means 
 something more than the reestablishment of 
 constitutional guarantees which were abolished 
 legally or illegally during the war. It means 
 that the world has to reconstruct itself politi- 
 cally before it can bring into life a new social 
 order. As long as monarchs rule there will be 
 obstacles in the way of social reforms. A mon- 
 archy, besides the fact that it is a survival of 
 personified feudalism, contains in itself many 
 corrupting elements which hinder society from 
 attaining normal development. The world was
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 259 
 
 happy to see the monarchies of the Central 
 Powers fall. It understood that even with the 
 utmost degree of parhamentarism a monarch 
 who occupied a throne without any other right 
 than the generally recognized tradition of his 
 having been born in the family of its preced- 
 ing occupant, must be the cause of mental and 
 moral slavery. A nation can be great and crea- 
 tive without possessing a luxurious and expen- 
 sive imperial court. A man whose health, 
 happiness, and caprices exist as a result of the 
 exploitation of many thousands of people who 
 are called sub j ects represents something which 
 is more immoral and more terrible than the 
 older and more open institution of slavery. In 
 old times we had at least the advantage of 
 seeing things as they were. ^Vhen society saw 
 itself, its defects, in the light of its duties and 
 obligations, it revolted and abolished that phase 
 of the exploitation of human beings by other 
 human beings; but the modern civilized slave 
 owner, with all his embellishments, disguises the 
 institution behind an elegant mask and sug- 
 gests the false idea that he is the symbol of 
 the greatness of his people. The result is that 
 society exists not because its own bonds of 
 unity are strong but because it is ruled by a
 
 260 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 man who has an army of military and civil 
 slaves who guard his interests and who sup- 
 press any attempts at advance or progress. A 
 monarch creates a great army of the privileged 
 who are, so to speak, the high court valets of 
 his majesty. Under such conditions we have 
 not only the two struggling classes of workers 
 and idlers : we have also a class of high f eudals 
 who are called by another name than that used 
 in the eighteenth century, but who, with their 
 benevolent philanthropic policies maintain the 
 spirit of slavery and submission in the heart of 
 the nation, and they corrupt not only the peo- 
 ple of their own nation but those of others who 
 have long ago rid themselves of their own 
 majesties and princes. Is it not striking that 
 not only bourgeois France with her traditions 
 and ambitions of the Second Empire tried to 
 imitate the grandeur of the few remaining mon- 
 archs of Europe, but that even such an original 
 democracy as the repubhc of the United States 
 could not be completely independent at the 
 peace conference in Versailles, but had also to 
 make obeisance to the majesties represented 
 there. It seems that the worthies there as- 
 sembled believed that if they did but meet, 
 shake hands, change their full dress costumes
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 261 
 
 or uniforms twice or thrice a day, nothing more 
 would be needed to make the world safe for 
 democracy. 
 
 The Congress of Vienna in 1814 was famous 
 because of its wonderful statesmanship, when 
 the Holy Alliance was formed to the sound of 
 music in the Schonbrunn Palace at Vienna, 
 and Metternich and Prince Gortchakov or 
 Alexander the First and the international liar 
 Talle}Tand danced and drank together. A 
 hundred and five years passed, and what was 
 changed? First the place. Instead of Vienna 
 we have Paris and instead of the Schonbrunn 
 Palace we have the Palace of Versailles. In- 
 stead of marble halls we have a hall of mirrors. 
 But how was a protesting and suffering world 
 made happier or freer by the treaty signed 
 by old men in the hall of mirrors, amid 
 the tinkling of fountains, with the ghost of 
 Louis XIV perhaps whispering in the air. 
 Doubtless they enjoyed their surroundings, 
 but in the meantime hundreds of peaceful Hin- 
 dus and Egyptians were being shot do^vn by 
 machine guns and having bombs dropped on 
 their quiet homes from aeroplanes, far from the 
 whispering fountains and the hall of mirrors. 
 
 As long as monarchs exist it will be impos-
 
 262 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 sible to abolish the privileges and the servile 
 devotion to princes who express in their sacred 
 persons the prestige of a nation. Social free- 
 dom and social democracy are impossible of at- 
 tainment, because the privileged groups sur- 
 rounding the monarchs are the active leaders 
 of the state, and must inevitably be so. They 
 have their agents and spies. They represent 
 the spirit of militarism, no matter whether 
 based on compulsory conscription or on volun- 
 tary enlistment. The absence of compulsory 
 conscription in England early in the war did 
 not prevent that country from having a great 
 share in its battles and from procuring the 
 lion's share of the spoils. As long as a man is 
 dressed in a uniform and looks down on his 
 nation from above, never having been below, 
 no reconstruction of his nation is possible. 
 
 I cannot forget the impressions I got when 
 I visited the Tsar's palace after the revolution. 
 Putting aside the special Tsaristic qualities of 
 Nicholas, he differed very little from any other 
 king or monarch. Wealth beyond estimate 
 was spent in the hundreds of halls and brilliant 
 ballrooms. It seemed to me that from every 
 corner of the immense winter palace, from 
 every brilliant light, and on every precious and
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 263 
 
 wonderful and rare object there were ghosts, 
 ghosts of lives lost and souls tortured, souls sac- 
 rificed for this stupid display of grandeur. 
 Never did I realize the humbleness and stupid- 
 ity of people and their real unhappiness as 
 when I visited the prisoner of the Russian 
 Revolution at Tsarskoye Seloe, Colonel Nicho- 
 las Romanoff. Seeing his dull, cruel eyes, his 
 plain, ordinary face, I thought how weak, how 
 stupid, and how poor in spirit is a people who 
 permits its nation to be ruled by a man, — any 
 man, — a man who reads the words written by 
 others and calls them his own ; who, in spite of 
 his ignorance and weakness, was permitted to 
 send millions of the sons of his people to death 
 on a battlefield. What is the value, I asked 
 myself, of our philosophies, our sciences, our 
 universities, our attainments, when we are sim- 
 ply slaves and when we permit ourselves to be 
 slaves of a man born in a golden bed, brought 
 up in idleness? I remembered how a few 
 years before the war Russia had been in a 
 tremendous excitement over a new organiza- 
 tion of school boys, who were formed in mili- 
 tary regiments, something like Boy Scouts. In 
 all the schools the boys were compelled to sub- 
 mit to military training and to march in the
 
 264 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 streets in military formation, and after a year 
 of this noble preparatory work the boys were 
 sent by thousands to Petrograd where they 
 were reviewed by His Majesty and His High- 
 ness, the nine-year-old son of His Majesty. 
 These boys, "the hope of our future," were 
 supposed to be happy because they were al- 
 lowed to carry rifles, real rifles. 
 
 And all this because of a childish caprice of 
 the little Highness. He complained that his 
 father had a great army of big soldiers and 
 that he, too, wanted an army of little soldiers, 
 so the kind paternal heart gave the son an army 
 of little soldiers. But the point is that afl this 
 was considered as the last word in educational 
 achievements, and approved from a political, 
 national, moral, and patriotic point of view. 
 How many millions were spent, how much time 
 wasted — and for what ! 
 
 Does it not remind one of the two sons of 
 the English king, George the Fifth, who are 
 now acting as the commercial travelers of Eng- 
 Hsh Imperialism, and carrying sample cases 
 of "international friendship"? The heir to the 
 British throne is a "wonderful youth." He 
 said, it was reported by the most respectable 
 papers, that American girls are very nice girls.
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 265 
 
 He is so highly talented that when, having 
 been impressed and almost overwhelmed by the 
 courteous reception accorded him by American 
 officials, he was moved to express his gratifi- 
 cation in an extemporaneous speech he had to 
 refer to his prepared manuscript only three 
 times. (This is almost literally the report of 
 a New York newspaper.) 
 
 The other and younger son went to Persia 
 and brought the Persian Shah to London, thus 
 consummating in a "friendly" way a most 
 shameful "agreement" which deprives Persia 
 of any kind of independence — and all this not 
 even under the auspices of the League of Na- 
 tions, but only because of the friendship and 
 devoted love between the Persian and English 
 people ! 
 
 At a time when the world is exhausted with 
 war; when there is no house and no family in 
 all Europe which has not lost a member in the 
 war does it not sound shameful, ridiculous, to 
 read of the wonderful achievements of the 
 Prince of Wales in America? Among all these 
 there is one that is really characteristic. The 
 Prince, so was it reported, unlike his father, 
 who is very much interested in postage stamps, 
 is especially ardent about walking sticks, of
 
 266 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 which he has collected more than fifty, all of 
 which are carried about wherever the Prince 
 goes, by one of the Colonels of his staff, so that 
 if the royal heir chooses to change his stick 
 when he alights from his car he may do so. 
 
 So long as this kind of vaudeville perform- 
 ance, this opera bouffe, lasts in Europe there 
 can never be any reconstruction of Europe as 
 a whole. 
 
 The capitalist classes take refuge in these 
 monarchical remnants in Europe and under 
 their international and political protection 
 hope to maintain the old order. Their hopes 
 are vain. Indeed, beneath their attempt to 
 keep old privileges lies their awareness that 
 radical changes must be made, that a way for 
 labor must be opened ; and they are organizing 
 hundreds of committees and societies for eco- 
 nomic investigation and for a peaceful and 
 gradual solution of the situation which has 
 already wrecked Europe. So far they have 
 found no plan or project which has construc- 
 tive or creative features, for they have limited 
 themselves to the problem of making men work 
 more effectively now that economic values have 
 been destroyed on the battlefields. And in the 
 other camp, that of labor, there is a fear, a
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 267 
 
 hesitancy as to what is to be done, and the 
 leaders lack both audacity in action and a clear 
 comprehension of facts. On the other hand 
 there is a general current of thought which 
 sees the elimination of all evils in the nationali- 
 zation of the primary industries of the state, 
 such as coal mines and railroads. It seems to 
 me that this latter view is a mistake, both from 
 the standpoint of labor tactics and from that 
 of the final aims of labor. Nationalization 
 gives too many resources and too great power 
 to the state as such, giving greater weight and 
 importance to the very institution which proved 
 fatal during the last three-quarters of the nine- 
 teenth century. The already overwhelming 
 power of the state was one of the causes of our 
 moral and political collapse, and by means of 
 nationalization we shall only make stronger the 
 forces which have already proved so dangerous. 
 The idea of nationalization seems to have a psy- 
 chological attraction, because it gives the il- 
 lusion that the men who work in a nationalized 
 industry are liberated from the exploitation of 
 private owners; and because the stubborn re- 
 sistance of the private owners increases the sup- 
 posed value of that reform in the minds of the 
 working people. But it seems to me a mistake.
 
 268 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 We must not forget that in 1917 a league of 
 nations was advocated hj labor elements 
 throughout the world. The league of nations 
 was a dream and an ideal of the trades unions 
 and of the Socialist party. But the financial 
 and industrial aristocracy objected to it, denied 
 the value of it — and afterwards showed their 
 flexibilit)^ and their business genius and have 
 made of the league of nations a League of Na- 
 tions, Inc., a trust company of the world's busi- 
 ness men! Now the labor of the world objects 
 to the league of nations while the capitalist class 
 defends and upholds it. 
 
 This flexibility and business genius cannot 
 be overlooked now. It is just as likely to turn 
 the nationalization of industry into a tool for 
 its own interests as it has already made of the 
 league of nations a valuable weapon. The only 
 difference is that under the control of the gov- 
 ernment the financiers will not have the respon- 
 sibilities they had before, owning industry 
 themselves, and on the one hand the govern- 
 ment will be dependent upon their money, and 
 on the other they will have nothing to do with 
 satisfying the demands of labor, procuring 
 markets, or finding raw material. It will then 
 be too late for the laboring classes to protest
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 269 
 
 because they will have to fight against the gov- 
 ernment itself, and by that time the latter will 
 be so stabilized by the reorganization of the 
 class alliances of the capitalist classes that the 
 worker will be able to gain nothing by protest. 
 How then can society recover from its dis- 
 ease ? We want an illuminating idea, and that 
 idea is in the decentralization of the state. Due 
 to wartime conditions the Russian Revolution, 
 in pre-Bolshevist days, could accomplsh very 
 little, but it did accomplish enough to furnish 
 some ground for judgment of the value of that 
 idea and of the main tendencies of the different 
 classes. My experiences in the Ministry of 
 Labor taught me that nothing is so attractive 
 to the capitalist owner as nationalization. 
 Even when the state does not plan it they urge 
 it themselves. Then, after the revolution, we 
 were confronted with the needs of the workers 
 who were disorganized to the last degree with 
 strikes, we were constantly besieged by owners 
 of various industries who came to us for finan- 
 cial help, asserting that unless we gave them 
 money to conduct their industries they would 
 be unable to meet the wage demands of their 
 employees, and when the government refused 
 to meet their demands they begged us to "take
 
 270 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 over our factories." In some cases they did 
 not even ask any compensation, — having al- 
 ready assured themselves of future ease and 
 comfort by their enormous profiteering. When 
 the burden of the owners becomes too great to 
 bear they will place it on the shoulders of the 
 state. 
 
 One thing which really appeared during the 
 revolution — and it seems to me a vital and 
 fundamental thing — was labor control, the real 
 participation of the working man in the admin- 
 istration of the industry. In some factories of 
 the textile industry in Russia this system was 
 applied, and in spite of the short time, the ex- 
 periment showed evidence of good results. The 
 owner and the general administrators of the 
 factory worked together with the factory com- 
 mittee and neither profiteering nor strikes were 
 possible. We hear now, especially from Ger- 
 many, that there are no objections to sharing 
 with labor the control of the profits. They 
 hope that the efficiency of the industry will in- 
 crease, while the laboring man will see for him- 
 self the limitations of the industry and will not 
 make exaggerated demands. They hope, as 
 they did in Russia, that the ignorance of labor 
 will be no match for the sophistication of the
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 271 
 
 owners and managers, and that they can hide 
 some share of the profits and retain their se- 
 crets of management. Therefore even labor 
 control requires some qualifications and modi- 
 fications. 
 
 The Trade Union must be considered not 
 only as a workers' organization but as the main 
 organism and body of labor control. It is not 
 sufficient to have a workers' committee organ- 
 ized of representatives of the workers in a 
 factory, but certain representatives of the labor 
 unions themselves must be a part of the shop 
 committee. We had organized in Russia so- 
 called "Chambers of Reconciliation," some- 
 thing like the arbitration boards (except that 
 they were permanent) in this country. These 
 bodies were made up of representatives of the 
 different trade unions, local and national, and 
 the representatives of capital. The state, as 
 represented by the ministry of labor, had no 
 right to interfere with the disputes of capital 
 and labor except in an advisory capacity, and 
 its advice could be accepted or rejected at will. 
 If labor would make the sharing of control an 
 issue of its campaign it could compel the gov- 
 ernments to stand absolutely aside and to have 
 no right of interference, and its voice would be
 
 272 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 more effective than through any schemes of 
 nationalization, or any governmental regula- 
 tion of the relations between capital and labor. 
 It is certain that such a reorganization of in- 
 dustrial relations must be very painful, that the 
 state and society as a whole will suffer very 
 much from the controversies that will arise at 
 first, due to the stubborn resistance of both 
 sides, but this fight combined with the policy of 
 strikes as an economic and political issue will 
 paralyze both the attempt of the state to in- 
 terfere and the resistance of the owners. Only 
 by these methods can anything be attained 
 without giving undue emphasis to either. 
 The increasing power of labor will increase 
 labor's consciousness of responsibility. And 
 when labor is sufficiently well-apprised of its 
 task, when it has discovered both the defects 
 of the present state system and the uselessness 
 of such reforms as are based upon the continu- 
 ance of the state system, it will prepare our 
 industrial machinery for a new form of organi- 
 zation. It is too early, of course, to describe 
 precisely the characteristics of this renovated 
 industrial mechanism : but I risk the prediction 
 that it will take the form of a widespread 
 municipalization of industries, working toward
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 273 
 
 the voluntary federation of those enterprises 
 that are inter-regional in scope, instead of the 
 wholesale system of "block" nationalization 
 that has for so long been the goal of "progres- 
 sive" thinkers, both Socialist and non-Socialist. 
 The present state maintains municipal bodies 
 as subordinate members of its administrative 
 system: it permits the city to exercise the bare 
 minimum of functions necessary to its exist- 
 ence, and it has arrogantly assumed that the 
 right to local self-government can be dispensed 
 or withheld by the state. This weakness of our 
 municipalities is the result of a series of his- 
 toric accidents which favored state concentra- 
 tion at the expense of local interests, and sub- 
 stituted the system of centralism for that of 
 voluntary federation. With the rise of labor 
 and the removal of the breach between the gov- 
 ernors and the governed the necessity for main- 
 taining the absolute supremacy of the state will 
 be removed : and we may accordingly look for- 
 ward to a growth of autonomy by municipali- 
 ties, as well as the corresponding increase in 
 vigor in other voluntary cooperative associa- 
 tions. 
 
 The main guiding idea in economic organiza- 
 tion should be the thought that industry be-
 
 274 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 longs to society, and not to the state, to the 
 community and not to the government. The 
 necessity for a genuine and continuously 
 operative labor control does not seem to me to 
 require an elaborate explanation, nor need the 
 reasons for it be supported by intricate ap- 
 peals to philosophic and moral principles. It 
 is clear that objections raised by the capitalist 
 on the score that labor is not the creative ele- 
 ment in industry, but only the productive one, 
 and that therefore labor cannot pretend to par- 
 ticipate in functions peculiar to the enter- 
 preneur, who is the "brains of the business," 
 can be met even by the weakest of economists 
 and the most limited of philosophers. Argu- 
 ments based on these grounds are only popular 
 repetitions of those twin parents of capitalist 
 ideology, David Ricardo and Samuel Smiles, 
 both of whom sanctimoniously crowned the 
 self-made man without taking into consider- 
 ation the glaring moral fact that the self-made 
 man's fortunes were based on a systematic sac- 
 rifice of the blood and the tissue and the energy 
 and the vital impulses of the lower classes. 
 Those who oppose labor control are doubtless 
 a little nearer to reality when they assert that 
 labor is economically and culturally not pre-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 275 
 
 pared to assume the tremendous burden of 
 controlling and regulating such a huge and 
 complicated, and withal delicate, mechanism as 
 present-day economic society. They are right 
 when they say that labor is ignorant : but who 
 has made the laborer the "hand" that he is: 
 who has deprived him of the use of his brains? 
 Is the working man ignorant because a dull 
 brain is his ideal, or because capitalist society 
 has acted as though to keep a laborer in ignor- 
 ance were the only means of keeping him at 
 work? Does the working man remain without 
 intellectual resources because he can conceive 
 of no better occupation than those few mo- 
 tions of the hand which make him so service- 
 able, for example, as a cog in a chain process 
 at a Ford plant, or because his body, his brain, 
 and his soul have been limited to these motions 
 and hy these motions in the pursuit of his daily 
 bread ? 
 
 The abolition of our twentieth century slav- 
 ery, even though it cannot be attained without 
 some temporary disorder, will have something 
 better than a negative value. Freedom does 
 not consist simply in the absence of chains : its 
 influence is active and positive and creative: 
 and the chief result of industrial freedom will
 
 276 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 be a widespread efflorescence of cultural forces 
 that have long been dorman4; and suppressed. 
 The new age will be an age of cultural libera- 
 tion; and this means at the same time that it 
 will be an age of cultural reconstruction. The 
 priests and acolytes of the old order have pre- 
 served a peculiar view of culture. They seem 
 to believe that art, beauty, science, and philoso- 
 phy are things that belong by eminent right 
 only to those who were so fortunate as to be 
 born several blocks away from the smutty 
 drudgeries and necessities of the factory. Cul- 
 ture, according to those who express this view, 
 whether they belong to the university or the 
 banking house, rests upon idleness : and in con- 
 sequence the privilege of being idle is the high- 
 est attainment of civilization! Culture is but 
 the decoration, the embroidery, the transparent 
 but useless veil which covers the activities of a 
 society whose highest aim is to have no activity. 
 It is not surprising that a revolutionist like 
 Lunacharsky, the Bolshevist commissar of edu- 
 cation, resents all this so-called culture and 
 bitterly condemns the civilization that has pro- 
 duced it. Having traveled through Europe 
 and seen the great monuments of Vienna, 
 Paris, and Rome, and having come in contact
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 277 
 
 with the cultured hfe of the great capitals, 
 Lunacharsky is prepared to deny the creative 
 value of bourgeois culture, from top to bot- 
 tom, and so he dreams of creating a new one 
 which he calls proletarian culture. Decidedly 
 Lunacharsky is too extreme in his reaction. 
 He is too close to the revolution, and he ex- 
 aggerates the difference between art created 
 for the bourgeoisie and art created for the pro- 
 letariat under the impression that the first kind 
 was created by the bourgeoisie and that the 
 second will be produced by the proletariat. 
 This assumption of his will not stand criti- 
 cism, and yet the feeling behind it is sound and 
 just. It is true that the products of art and 
 science arise out of the whole community and 
 in turn tend to diffuse their advantages 
 throughout the whole community: but it is 
 likewise historically a fact that our cultural 
 achievements have been monopolized for cen- 
 turies by a single economic class, and the 
 standards of culture have therefore become cor- 
 respondingly debased and weakened. In the 
 course of this long and pernicious monopoly 
 the right of access to our great common human 
 heritage was lost by the great mass of people, 
 and thus there arose in the bourgeoisie the con-
 
 278 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 ception that a certain elect and self -selected 
 group rose in this world, ordained to guard its 
 cultural heritage, and that the interests of this 
 group were identical with the interests of those 
 who held vested interests in property and privi- 
 lege. Thus one of the great reasons for re- 
 fusing to give up these vested interests was the 
 necessity for protecting culture against the 
 attack of vandals surging up from the working 
 classes below! The false and malicious char- 
 acter of this theory does not have to be pointed 
 out : it has only to be stated to be condemned. 
 It is in reaction against the bourgeois notion 
 of a peculiar culture with a peculiar class to 
 guard it that the idea of a proletarian culture 
 arose. But from the standpoint of the artist 
 both conceptions are false. Our culture is a 
 unity, as wide as humanity and as deep as life. 
 When the labor man enters, as he rightfully 
 will and must, the old temples of beauty and 
 knowledge which have so long been guarded 
 from his profane feet, he will not, it seems to 
 me, create anything new in culture itself. He 
 will only bring back to it those characteristics 
 it has suffered by losing — freedom, and crea- 
 tion, and a perpetual intercourse with the great 
 world outside.
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 279 
 
 Francis Bacon used to say that whatever 
 kind of governments may exist or whatever 
 kind of systems, there was always a field where 
 only one system exists, and the name of the 
 system was freedom and of the field, science. 
 Were he witness to our times he would prob- 
 ably have to confess that the field of knowledge 
 has lost its freedom, too. Among the remain- 
 ing problems of the day it seems to me that no 
 problem is so important and so pressing as that 
 of education. The doors must be opened ^dde 
 for labor education. We have to give up the 
 old conception that it is enough to teach a man 
 to read and to write and to make a few arith- 
 metical calculations, before society sends him 
 to the factory to spend the remainder of his life 
 in a depressed routine. We need not fear di- 
 minished production if we allot the worker as 
 much time as he needs for learning. In fact 
 decreased production is not the fault of the 
 idleness or laziness of the working man and he 
 should not be made to pay for it. Production 
 has decreased because the working man was 
 sent out to die on the battlefields in that patri- 
 otic sport called war. Have we the right to 
 ask these same masses, deprived of their youth 
 — for there is very little youth left in Eu-
 
 280 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 rope — to pay for our sins and crimes? It is 
 already vaguely dawning upon us that no in- 
 creased production will be sufficient to bring 
 us out of the impasse into which we have 
 come. 
 
 There was some consideration given, in the 
 first period of the Russian Revolution, to the 
 introduction of universal compulsory work, 
 which is absolutely different from that which is 
 created by the Soviets under the name of indus- 
 trial armies. That same idea is now being dis- 
 cussed in Germany. It sounds a little startling, 
 perhaps, but is it more cruel than compulsory 
 military conscription? If we utilized, for in- 
 stance, the amount of energy wasted in sports 
 — not in idleness — ^would we not have a tremen- 
 dous fund of energy which could be used for 
 production ? That is why Tolstoy was violently 
 opposed to any kind of sports; he considered 
 them a substitute for work and a kind of dis- 
 traction of the social sense. He protested 
 against horse-racing and even physical train- 
 ing, advising instead real work in the fields, 
 and in the factories. He himself used to 
 saw wood and to work with the plough, 
 and claimed that in this kind of work he 
 was not only obtaining the pleasure of train-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 281 
 
 ing and exercising his body but that he was 
 also cooperating with the people and pro- 
 ducing things of value. He asserted that as a 
 man works and produces he understands better 
 what labor means and what it costs. And it 
 would be, from the educational and from the 
 social point of view, more valuable were the 
 system of education so arranged that not only 
 students of engineering had to pass a certain 
 time in factories in order to learn the technical 
 needs of their profession, but that students of 
 philosophy and economics should spend their 
 time not in g^^mnastic exercises but in factories 
 and in the fields. That was the idea which 
 filled the minds of the Russian intellectuals 
 since the 70's of the nineteenth century; and 
 during the war the Russian youths used to 
 leave their homes and schools and go, sometimes 
 two or three thousand miles, to work in the 
 fields with the peasant women whose husbands 
 were at the front. But that was only an 
 emergency. Our educational system would 
 really deserve its name were such a course made 
 a part of the regular curriculum. 
 
 It is difficult in these davs of unrest, hatred 
 and enmity, to see any way to stimulate a re- 
 juvenation of life. We were probably bound
 
 282 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 either to make conjectures or else to apply the 
 theory of Henri Bergson. In his latest book, 
 "L'energie Spirituelle," he says: "Our old 
 philosophers assert that before we can find a 
 solution we have to know how to find it. We 
 must discuss the knowledge we have, and criti- 
 size our critics, and only when we know the 
 value of our instrument will we be able to use 
 it. Alas!" he says, "such a time will never 
 come. 
 
 "I see only one way to know how far we can 
 proceed, and that is to proceed as far as we 
 can, to march onward. If the knowledge which 
 we are seeking is real and instructive and is yet 
 hidden from us all the preliminary analyses of 
 our thought will be able to show us only the 
 impossibility of going as far as we want, be- 
 cause we studied our thought before we ob- 
 tained the knowledge and experience we are 
 aspiring towards." 
 
 The only way to go anywhere is to go ahead. 
 We must have faith in our ability to get to our 
 destination before we attempt to discover it. 
 It is the impetus, the urge to go onward, to 
 experiment and to perfect, that will bring us 
 into a new age : we shall not draw a step nearer 
 our goal whilst we dispute about the relative
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 283 
 
 merits of equally static social ideals. Our main 
 concern must be to see that the direction of 
 our vital impetus is toward a life more abund- 
 ant, in the direction, that is to say, of the crea- 
 tive activities of peace ; rather than toward that 
 widespread desolation and destruction to which 
 we were being driven during the generation 
 that brought on the war. One thing has be- 
 come incontestably clear to us : we see now what 
 war means and what the war animus can do 
 to our lives. We know the "educational" 
 power of war for what it is. We realize that 
 war brings about chauvinism instead of na- 
 tionalism; accentuated group egotism instead 
 of reconciliation ; reaction instead of progress ; 
 autocracy instead of democracy — and all this 
 irrespective of which side may be "right" and 
 which army victorious. Unless we can root 
 these terrible consequences of war out of our 
 minds, unless we can purge our hearts of all 
 the brutalities and morbidities that the war se- 
 creted, there is no possibility to making any 
 fundamental adjustments either in industry or 
 education or in any other phase of our social 
 life. 
 
 Our hopes for a new life are conditional 
 upon our ability to assume an attitude of in-
 
 284 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 transigent denial to the institution of war. We 
 must cultivate a militant pacifism which will 
 refuse altogether to compromise upon the es- 
 sential issue of war and peace. We must real- 
 ize that no decent future can be derived from 
 a peace that is half-heartedly maintained until 
 it is interrupted by a war that is half-heartedly 
 supported. Let us be prepared to recognize 
 that the Russian theory of defeatism is perhaps 
 the most healthy and noble idea with which 
 war can be met. Unless we are ready to be 
 defeated, unless we are ready to sacrifice our 
 lives for peace instead of sacrificing them in 
 the trenches we will be unable to put an end 
 to the bellicose imperialisms which threaten 
 perpetually to over-run the world and to make 
 orderly social relations and creative scientific 
 and artistic activities impossible. There is no 
 use finding formulas, points, covenants, and 
 the like which would make war acceptable by 
 throwing a veil of polite phrase in front of the 
 curtain of blood which hangs over the battle- 
 field. These phrases are at their best but ra- 
 tionalizations which tend to obscure the naked 
 operation of our brute instincts, and which 
 perpetuate by mechanical means a belligerent 
 mood long after the instinct itself has been sat-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 285 
 
 isfied and the emotion that attended it has been 
 exhausted. 
 
 The next generation will find that the task 
 of getting rid of the consequences of the war, 
 and preventing new wars from being precipi- 
 tated, will exhaust a lifetime of its energies. 
 Whether the governments of to-day will re- 
 main in power, whether they will be replaced 
 by better or worse ones, is still uncertain. It 
 is beyond our ability to predict the posture of 
 affairs in the near future : the variables are too 
 complicated and no formula that can be de- 
 rived from either mathematics or sociology is 
 capable of handling them, for all that Henry 
 Adams adduces to the contrary in his post- 
 humous volume on "The Degradation of the 
 Democratic Dogma." What will happen is un- 
 certain; but what should happen is plain, and 
 if the moral imperative is taken sufficiently to 
 heart, if we plan our lives and map out our 
 activities in view of it, the "should" will tend 
 to be translated into an accomplished fact. 
 One thing, then, humanity can and must do: 
 it must take out of the hands of our rulers the 
 main tool by which they have worked such 
 wholesale havoc and destruction — the tool of 
 war. So long as they retain possession of this
 
 286 The Passing of the Old Order in Europe 
 
 tool the best will in the world will not move us 
 in the direction of a new social order: human- 
 ity will be as incapable of achieving a noble life 
 as a prisoner in ball and chains is of dancing. 
 We have already seen that it is a mistake to 
 think that we can get rid of violence by pohti- 
 cal and social revolutions. There remains al- 
 ways the door by which civilized man escapes 
 and organizes his forces for a new attack. It 
 was so in the eighteenth century, at the time of 
 the first French Revolution. It was so in the 
 revolution of 1830 and still later in 1848. And 
 it will be so in the future unless we concentrate 
 all our forces on a new revolution against war, 
 on undermining all the war orders and erasing 
 all the war slogans and counteracting all the 
 war moods, so that we may clear the ground of 
 iron and barbed wire and concrete and shrap- 
 nel and prepare the field of social effort for 
 the new crops that are to follow. It is true 
 that the new order will not be able to emerge 
 without pain, without sacrifice, without death ; 
 but it is not less imperative that we should learn 
 to bear without flinching the pangs and diffi- 
 culties of this more beneficent war, which will 
 be fought without declaration, without tanks 
 and machine guns, without rifles and gas. Per-
 
 Consequences and Possibilities 287 
 
 haps in hazarding the risks of a new order we 
 shall encounter death. Let us not be daunted. 
 Such a death is always the beginning of vic- 
 tory, and such a war is neither criminal nor in- 
 famous. 
 
 THE END
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 ??PC'D LD-l^fet^ book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 en 
 
 •itAR 4)3// 
 
 -*^ir\ 
 
 , n.\\^^ 
 
 JAVJ- ^- 
 
 Form L9-Series 4939
 
 
 , HM.|!J..*-.l I ll'j!':,:!'. t t /• I , I L I I I 
 
 AA 000 731 937 9 
 
 <f'^ 
 
 DK 
 
 265 
 Z64p