, political and
spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men
that determines their existence but, on the contrary, their social
existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production,
or--what is but a legal expression for the same thing--with the
property relations within which they had been at work before. From
forms of development of the forces of production these relations
turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution.

Marx and his followers are justified in their contention that the
physical necessities of man (not gods or great men) constitute the key
to his history by the fact that there was no mind of man before the
human body nor will there be any mind when the body has been
disintegrated; for the mind was made by the body, for the body, not the
body by the mind, for the mind. This very remarkable fact, when duly
considered, will change nearly all the ideas of most men and women about
almost everything.

A leader is but a mouthpiece of a people through which they give
expression to their deepest convictions and highest aspirations. Early
in my life Lincoln was the great leader of the people in the United
States, and late in it Lenin is the great leader of the people of the
world. The earlier of these was at least a rationalist and the latter is
an atheist, so that the first probably did not suppose himself to have
been inspired by a divinity, and the second certainly does not.

I claim, said Lincoln, not to have controlled events, but confess
plainly that events have controlled me.

In Lenin's Birthday Anniversary number of the magazine, Soviet Russia,
the Editor says:

At the very outset, we must clearly state that much of Lenin's
powerful position in present-day history is made by the history
itself,--by the fact that we are living at the moment when the
entire life of the race is vindicating in a most emphatic manner
the theoretical position occupied by Lenin for many years. After
all, Lenin, like Trotsky, was an unknown man, except to certain
political circles, and the mass of Russian revolutionists, even as
late as 1916. And yet, he was the same Lenin; had not the
opportunity come to put into practice the system for which he and
h