e slow to adopt a
fanatical creed. I do not know whether Bolshevism can be prevented
from acquiring universal power. But even if it cannot, I am persuaded
that those who stand out against it, not from love of ancient
injustice, but in the name of the free spirit of Man, will be the
bearers of the seeds of progress, from which, when the world's
gestation is accomplished, new life will be born.

The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and
despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force
capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously. Bolshevism has
supplied the new religion. It promises glorious things: an end of the
injustice of rich and poor, an end of economic slavery, an end of war.
It promises an end of the disunion of classes which poisons political
life and threatens our industrial system with destruction. It promises
an end to commercialism, that subtle falsehood that leads men to
appraise everything by its money value, and to determine money value
often merely by the caprices of idle plutocrats. It promises a world
where all men and women shall be kept sane by work, and where all work
shall be of value to the community, not only to a few wealthy
vampires. It is to sweep away listlessness and pessimism and weariness
and all the complicated miseries of those whose circumstances allow
idleness and whose energies are not sufficient to force activity. In
place of palaces and hovels, futile vice and useless misery, there is
to be wholesome work, enough but not too much, all of it useful,
performed by men and women who have no time for pessimism and no
occasion for despair.

The existing capitalist system is doomed. Its injustice is so glaring
that only ignorance and tradition could lead wage-earners to tolerate
it. As ignorance diminishes, tradition becomes weakened, and the war
destroyed the hold upon men's minds of everything merely traditional.
It may be that, through the influence of America, the capitalist
system will linger for another fifty years; but it will grow
continually weaker, and can never recover the position of easy
dominance which it held in the nineteenth century. To attempt to
bolster it up is a useless diversion of energies which might be
expended upon building something new. Whether the new thing will be
Bolshevism or something else, I do not know; whether it will be better
or worse than capitalism, I do not know. But that a radically new
order of societ