by any minority, however well
armed or however desperate, can overcome that great law.

The "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the sense in which that term is
used by the Russian Bolshevik leaders, and by those who in other countries
are urging that their example be followed, is not a policy of Marxian
Socialism. It is not a product of modern conditions. Rather it harks back
to the earlier conspiratory Socialism of Blanqui, with its traditions
inherited from Robespierre and Babeuf. So far as its advocates are
concerned, Marx and the whole modern Socialist movement might as well never
have existed at all. They take us back three-quarters of a century, to the
era before Marx, to that past so remote in intellectual and moral
character, though recent in point of time, when the working class of no
country in Europe possessed the right to vote--when the workers were
indeed proletarians and not citizens; not only propertyless, but also
"without a fatherland."

In truth, it is not difficult to understand how this theory has found
acceptance in Russia. It was not difficult to understand why Marx's
doctrine of economic evolution was for many years rejected by most Russian
Socialists; why the latter took the view that Socialism must be more
quickly attained, that capitalism was not a necessary precursor of
Socialism in Russia, but that an intelligent leadership of passive masses
would successfully establish Socialism on the basis of the old Russian
communal institutions. It was quite easy to understand the change that came
with Russia's industrial awakening, how the development of factory
production gave an impetus to the Marxian theories. And, though it presents
a strange paradox, in that it comes at a time when, despite everything,
Russian capitalism continues to develop, it is really not difficult to
understand how and why pre-Marxian conceptions reappear in that great land
of paradoxes. Politically and intellectually the position of the
proletariat of Russia before the recent Revolution was that of the
proletariat of France in 1848.

But that which baffles the mind of the serious investigator is the
readiness of so many presumably intelligent people living in countries
where--as in America--wholly different conditions prevail to ignore the
differences and be ready to abandon all the democratic advance made by the
workers. There is nothing more certain in the whole range of social and
political life than the fact that the d