muck among a multitude of
paralytics. It is not so much a political doctrine or a socialist theory
as a psychic disease of a section of the community which cannot be cured
without leaving permanent traces and perhaps modifying certain organic
functions of the society affected. For some students at a distance who
make abstraction from its methods--as a critic appreciating the
performance of "Hamlet" might make abstraction from the part of the
Prince of Denmark--it is a modification of the theory of Karl Marx, the
newest contribution to latter-day social science. In Russia, at any
rate, the general condition of society from which it sprang was
characterized not by the advance of social science, but by a psychic
disorder the germs of which, after a century of incubation, were brought
to the final phase of development by the war. In its origins it is a
pathological phenomenon.

Four and a half years of an unprecedented campaign which drained to
exhaustion the financial and economic resources of the European
belligerents upset the psychical equilibrium of large sections of their
populations. Goaded by hunger and disease to lawless action, and no
longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the
instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness.
Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human
punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made them insensible to
the less immediate restraints of a religious character. These phenomena
are not unusual concomitants of protracted wars. History records
numerous examples of the homecoming soldiery turning the weapons
destined for the foreign foe against political parties or social classes
in their own country. In other European communities for some time
previously a tendency toward root-reaching and violent change was
perceptible, but as the state retained its hold on the army it remained
a tendency. In the case of Russia--the country where the state, more
than ordinarily artificial and ill-balanced, was correspondingly
weak--Fate had interpolated a blood-stained page of red and white terror
in the years 1906-08. Although fitful, unorganized, and abortive, that
wild splutter was one of the foretokens of the impending cataclysm, and
was recognized as such by the writer of these pages. During the
foregoing quarter of a century he had watched with interest the sowing
of the dragon's teeth from which was one day to spring up a race