mind some of the
shabby transactions in which the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, Kuhn, or
Cohen, and Braunstein (Trotzky) of Petrograd, took an active part. The
former is said to have offered for sale the historic crown of St.
Stephen of Hungary--which to him was but a plain gold headgear adorned
with precious stones and a jeweled cross--to an old curiosity dealer of
Munich,[278] and when solemnly protesting that he was living only for
the Soviet Republic and was ready to die for it, he was actively
engaged in smuggling out of Hungary into Switzerland fifty million
kronen bonds, thirty-five kilograms of gold, and thirty chests filled
with objects of value.[279] His colleague Szamuelly's plunder is a
matter of history.

To such adventurers as those science is a drug. They are primitive
beings impressible mainly to concrete motives of the barest kind. The
dupes of Lenin were people of a different type. Many of them fancied
that the great political clash must inevitably result in an equally
great and salutary social upheaval. This assumption has not been borne
out by events.

Those fanatics fell into another error; they were in a hurry, and would
fain have effected their great transformation as by the waving of a
magician's wand. Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the
distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way
of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away
all hindrances regardless of consequences. In this spirit of absolutism
they abolished the services of the national debt, struck out the claims
of Russia's creditors to their capital or interest, and turned the shops
and factories over to labor boards. That was the initial blunder which
the ukase alluded to was subsequently issued to rectify. But it was too
late. The equilibrium of the forces of production had been definitely
upset and could no longer be righted.

One of the basic postulates of profitable production is the equilibrium
of all its essential factors--such as the laborer's wages, the cost of
the machinery and the material, the administration. Bring discord into
the harmony and the entire mechanism is out of gear.

The Russian workman, who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old
roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his
neighbor and none at all for his employer. "God Himself commands us to
despoil such gentry," is one of his sayings. He is in a hurry to e