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THE K I N G ’ S BUS I NESS population.” He describes in detail the point of failure with the different classes, the Nihilists, the Intelligentsia, and tlie various classes of people as * a whole. Of the Nihilists he says: “ They were anxious to get hold of the emancipated peasants and to energize them, but they had no knowledge of the people whose soul was, to use a Russian saying, a dusky forest........... They were aggressive atheists who took their dogmatic negations second- hand from foreign writers without verification or study. He speaks of them further as having “ hardly a trace of conscience and no sense of individual duty, no cleanliness, moral or ethical, in their habits, they fancied that hav ing fashioned a deity, they could yoke it to their char-a-bancs and drive to a marvelous Utopia. Everybody who disagreed with them was anathema, and even those who were not actually with them were under their ban.” He speaks of the Russian peasant as being as yet absolutely incapable of any form of democratic government. Of them he says, “ There.is a thick sub-stratum of primeval savagery in the peasant’s composition, not at all far from the surface, which separates him widely not only from Western peoples, but also from the intellectuals of his own race. The. revolting behavior of the soldiery and peasantry to their pwn kith and kin during the nation’s delirium tremens after March, 1917—which even revolutionary history is too prude to record—offers irrefragable evidence of the deplor able fact that the bulk of the Russian people is still in that primitive stage when self-government—even in the diluted form in which it is vouchsafed to some continental nations—would harm in lieu of helping it.” Though Dr. Dillon has been for years an enthusiastic radical, he speaks of the revolution of 1917 as a “ hopeless fiasco.” He says of it: “ The history of the revolution of 1917 in its technical aspect is the tale of a fatal psycholog ical error and its sequel,” and further on he says, “ They had no inkling of the decisive fact that the predatory character of the state had long since been assimilated by the people who were___ impatient to deprive the nobles of the land.” In other words, they were just as dishonest as the Czars only the Czars wanted the land for themselves and their satellites whereas the peasants wanted it for themselves.. Along this line he says further on, “ The Bolsheviki at once outbid the Kadets, took the people into partner ship with themselves and' practically offered it the situation of national parasite from which the bureaucracy had just been ousted, the only differ ence being, that the body on which the people was to prey was that of the well-to-do of the community.” In still another place he very happily describes the Bolsheviki by saying, “ Bolshevikism is Czarism upside down. ” In illustrations of this he says, “ It suppresses newspapers, forbids the liberty of the press, arrests or banishes the elected of the nation, and con nives at or encourages crimes of diabolical ferocity.” In discussing the future outlook, he says: “ The majority of the nation is still hardly more
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