must have been struck by the extraordinarily high
value placed upon law in that period. The reason was that, in
countries infested by robber barons, law was the first requisite of
progress. We, in the modern world, take it for granted that most
people will be law-abiding, and we hardly realize what centuries of
effort have gone to making such an assumption possible. We forget how
many of the good things that we unquestionably expect would disappear
out of life if murder, rape, and robbery with violence became common.
And we forget even more how very easily this might happen. The
universal class-war foreshadowed by the Third International, following
upon the loosening of restraints produced by the late war, and
combined with a deliberate inculcation of disrespect for law and
constitutional government, might, and I believe would, produce a state
of affairs in which it would be habitual to murder men for a crust of
bread, and in which women would only be safe while armed men protected
them. The civilized nations have accepted democratic government as a
method of settling internal disputes without violence. Democratic
government may have all the faults attributed to it, but it has the
one great merit that people are, on the whole, willing to accept it as
a substitute for civil war in political disputes. Whoever sets to work
to weaken this acceptance, whether in Ulster or in Moscow, is taking a
fearful responsibility. Civilization is not so stable that it cannot
be broken up; and a condition of lawless violence is not one out of
which any good thing is likely to emerge. For this reason, if for no
other, revolutionary violence in a democracy is infinitely dangerous.

IV

REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP

The Bolsheviks have a very definite programme for achieving
Communism--a programme which has been set forth by Lenin repeatedly,
and quite recently in the reply of the Third International to the
questionnaire submitted by the Independent Labour Party.

Capitalists, we are assured, will stick at nothing in defence of their
privileges. It is the nature of man, in so far as he is politically
conscious, to fight for the interests of his class so long as classes
exist. When the conflict is not pushed to extremes, methods of
conciliation and political deception may be preferable to actual
physical warfare; but as soon as the proletariat make a really vital
attack upon the capitalists, they will be met by guns and bayonets.