work, the former on Siberia and the latter on folklore, have written favourably of the Soviets, though Mr Ransome has not been uncritical. But these two names are not among the advisory delegates of the Trades Union Delegation.

Three names are enumerated in order: Commander Harold Grenfell, Mr A. R. McDonell, and Mr George Young. Commander Grenfell is our old friend and comrade of the Great War; he was British Naval Attaché in Petrograd. All who know him respect him, and remember especially his courage during the first Bolshevist murders at Kronstadt, when he made speeches on several warships recalling the sailors to discipline. It is, however, no disrespect to say of him that he would be far from claiming any special knowledge of Russia. His part in the Report-as announced in the preface-is very modest, eight pages out of 234; and though he writes on the most contentious subject of all, the Red Army, he says here nothing which could offend any fair-minded critic, as he also says nothing which gives particular support to the Conclusions' of the Report. The second advisory delegate, Mr McDonell, was British Vice-Consul in the Caucasus, which, however, racially is not Russia. He claims no special knowledge of Russian central politics and parties during recent years. In that section of which, according to the preface, he is the sole author (37 pages), he gives a fair-minded account of social conditions, and, like Commander Grenfell, he says nothing in particular to support the very definite theses of the Conclusions.'

The rest of the Report, with the exception of accounts of visits of the delegates to various institutions, amounts to a total of 135 pages, and, as stated in the preface, is the work of the third advisory delegate, Mr George Young. Of this, far the most important part of all, the chapters on the Soviet Government and its organisation (92 pages), he writes as sole author; in the Report on labour conditions (25) and the Report on Trans-Caucasia (18), he writes with the assistance of Mr McDonell,' who alone in the Delegation appears to have had any previous knowledge of Trans-Caucasia. To judge of the character of this collaboration, when one passes from Mr McDonell alone to Mr Young assisted by Mr McDonell

(p. 136), one returns immediately to an atmosphere of the most virulent political controversy. The 'Conclusions' of the Report are based on that part of it of which Mr Young is the writer, and the question of its authority is the question of the authority of Mr Young on Russia.

Mr Young, who was educated at Eton, served in the British Legation in Portugal, and was later my colleague in the University of London, where he was Professor of Portuguese. He is, of course, a very able man. He knows the Russian language; but there must be at least ten thousand Russians who know English, and they would not for that reason alone be accepted as authorities on England. The Report does not make it clear that he has ever spent any considerable time in Russia. He accompanied Mr Purcell on the Delegation of 1920. The subject on which Mr Young is an authority is Portugal, and British workers are no more likely than any one else to suppose that a professor of one subject becomes by the fact of his appointment the best authority on every other.

It may be asked how, if these gentlemen do not know enough, it is possible, in the present state of communications, to know much more. Water cannot be stopped from flowing. After the departure or expulsion of political opponents of the Communists, there continues to be a stream of exiles, wholly unpolitical. But best of all is the evidence of the Soviet papers themselves, which are full of searchings of heart as to the course which things are taking. There is no sign of their study in the Report, which throughout is constructed on a definite plan. All destructively critical information on the present system in Russia, however first hand it may be, is discounted as lies' of the capitalist press.' In a public debate with the Scottish Communist, Mr William Gallagher (who proved a very chivalrous opponent), I read out several passages from the British Communist official translation of the works of Lenin, which were hailed throughout by the Communists in the audience with a prolonged cry of 'lies.' I hardly felt that it was for me to disagree; but it is a habit of Communist audiences, or rather Communist cells in audiences, to put this word on tap from the outset, as a kind of insurance. It is like the red-haired cabman who shouts

the word 'Ginger' at his fellows, in order to get it in first. Now, the Report at least makes it clear that the Communists are only a fraction of the population in Russia (their own official figures for 1924 are quoted on p. 14 as 350,000, in a population of about one hundred and thirty millions), and that in spite of the insignificance of their numbers they enjoy and utilise to the full an undivided control of the press there. No other political view may be printed. It would be laughable to suggest that conditions in the remotest degree similar prevail in England. Presumably the incessant references to the 'lies' of the 'capitalist press are a manoeuvre which aims at producing the same effect in Trade Union circles here as has already been attained in Russia; namely, that no view should be heard except the Communist.

After disposing in this way of all information on the subject except its own, the Report proceeds to fix from the outset a certain propaganda perspective which is entirely contradictory to the main course, undisputed and indisputable, of recent Russian history. First: as in the proposed debates with Mr Purcell's Society mentioned above, the Tsarist régime is put up on one side, and the Soviet régime as its sole alternative on the other. It is left to be gathered that the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar who had already ruined the country, and that the Bolsheviks have already done a great deal towards its recovery; this is, in fact, the main thesis of the Report. Now, I was in Russia during most of the period under discussion; but evidently none of the delegates were there, and presumably the affairs of Portugal were engrossing Mr Young. When the Tsar fell, almost the whole staff of the Bolshevist group were in Switzerland engaged-as the publicity of their work made generally known-in writing defeatist literature, which by the good will of the German imperial authorities was widely circulated in the Russian Concentration Camps in Germany. Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Lunacharsky, Krylenko, and others only arrived in Russia on April 16, almost exactly one month after the Tsar had abdicated (March 15). This was as well known in Petrograd as any other of the main facts of the Revolution, and the speeches which they delivered on their arrival were printed in the newspapers. Trotsky

arrived from Canada some time later still. In a word, the Bolsheviks had nothing to do with the fall of the Tsar; they only overthrew the Provisional Government (a Coalition of exactly the same political elements as then governed in England), and the Constituent Assembly, in which they were in a hopeless minority, and which they, therefore, dispersed by force after a single sitting, on Jan. 19, 1918. The only contrast which the Bolsheviks can claim is with the Government which they overthrew. They extinguished the liberty of the press, which at that time was complete. They extinguished the only democracy which Russia has ever had, for the Constituent Assembly was elected on universal suffrage without distinction of race, religion, class, or sex. No historian can ever apply the name 'counter-revolutionary,' except to the Bolsheviks themselves; for theirs has been the only attempt since the fall of the Tsar to re-establish an autocracy.

Poor Russia! Thousands and thousands had been praying for the day of liberty, and had given their lives for it. I remember in those troubled months a letter to the press, signed by nearly all those who had the most famous revolutionary records in the past, protesting against the new autocracy which Lenin was seeking to impose. Those who took it hardest were precisely the fellow-Marxists, the Mensheviks, with exactly the views of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, who foretold that the attempt to enforce Marxism by the machinegun would put back its acceptance by free minds for one generation at least. For fifty odd years liberty had been becoming a fervent aspiration of the whole people. In 1905, two movements, constructive and destructive, had proceeded side by side. The destructive movement failed through the good sense of the population; the constructive more than half succeeded, and at least Russia obtained a National Assembly. When the time came for consummation, Russia was given her one period of liberty amid the horrors and exhaustion of a world war, and this time it was the destructive movement that finally triumphed. One recalls the words of Carnot to Napoleon, on the declaration of the first Empire, Was liberty only shown us to be withdrawn from our eyes?' Yet in France of to-day, it is not the Vol. 245.-No. 485.

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old régime or that of the Mountain that has remained; and so, sooner or later, it must prove in Russia.

Next the Report, like so many illiterate travellers to the new Russia, assumes a kind of savagery there up to the dawn of Bolshevist rule, and therefore it telescopes out just as it telescoped out Russia's eight months of liberty-the whole of that interesting period of the Duma during which, in spite of a quite inadequate electoral franchise, the people were gradually taking possession of their own affairs, both in economics and politics, and the Duma was becoming more and more representative of the whole people. All the admirable work of the elected County and Town Councils—the former, founded in 1865, existed in Russia many years before they were established in England-especially in the cause of public health and education, their institutions and even their buildings are presumed to have sprung up at the touch of the Bolshevist wand at the very moment which was actually the time of their ruin.

Then we are spoon-fed with the regulation phrase that all revolutions are necessarily bloody. The actual Revolution, the fall of the Tsar, was practically bloodless, and that was because all the people were behind it. Nobody who was in Petrograd at the time could possibly have made any kind of mistake about this. The bloodshed began when liberty was attacked. I saw the first armed processions of the Bolsheviks in the spring of 1917, and they were generally regarded as sacrilege. Further, by the same reasoning, any one who fought for the liberty of the country against the Bolshevist autocracy becomes, according to the Report, a kind of bandit. Again, the red-haired cabman! A group of men dissolving the National Assembly by force appropriate all the resources of the nation. You resist? Then you are a 'bandit'! But the most substantial falsification that pervades the Report is that which follows. Any one who knew his political alphabet in Russia was aware from the first of the Bolsheviks and their programme. Beginning with their split with the Mensheviks (Liberal Socialists) in 1903, they had come into the open during the Revolution of 1905, and failed. They had few adherents; the active members of the Social Democratic Party in 1917, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks