g them.... There
were, he added, old men, children numerous beyond count, so that one
could but compare them to the trees of a forest."[282]

From published records it is known that the Bolshevist thugs, when
tired of using the rifle, the machine-gun, the cord, and the bayonet,
expedited matters by drowning their victims by hundreds in the Black
Sea, in the Gulf of Finland, and in the great rivers. Submarine
cemeteries was the name given to these last resting-places of some of
Russia's most high-minded sons and daughters.[283] It is not in the
French Revolution that those deeds of wanton destruction and revolting
cruelty which are indissolubly associated with Bolshevism find a
parallel, but in Chinese history, which offers a striking and curious
prefiguration of the Leninist structure.[284] Toward the middle of the
tenth century, when the empire was plunged in dire confusion, a mystical
sect was formed there for the purpose of destroying by force every
vestige of the traditional social fabric, and establishing a system of
complete equality without any state organization whatever, after the
manner advocated by Leo Tolstoy. Some of the dicta of these sectarians
have a decidedly Bolshevist flavor. This, for example: "Society rests
upon law, property, religion, and force. But law is injustice and
chicane; property is robbery and extortion; religion is untruth, and
force is iniquity." In those days Chinese political parties were at
strife with each other, and none of them scorned any means, however
brutal, to worst its adversaries, but for a long while they were divided
among themselves and without a capable chief.

At last the Socialist party unexpectedly produced a leader, Wang Ngan
Shen, a man of parts, who possessed the gift of drawing and swaying the
multitude. Of agreeable presence, he was resourceful and unscrupulous,
soon became popular, and even captivated the Emperor, Shen Tsung, who
appointed him Minister. He then set about applying his tenets and
realizing his dreams. Wang Ngan Shen began by making commerce and trade
a state monopoly, just as Lenin had done, "in order," he explained, "to
keep the poor from being devoured by the rich." The state was proclaimed
the sole owner of all the wealth of the soil; agricultural overseers
were despatched to each district to distribute the land among the
peasants, each of these receiving as much as he and his family could
cultivate. The peasant obtained also the seed, but th