Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/230

184 every child to be well-born was proclaimed. The stigma of illegitimacy was removed. Each industry was to provide one maternity bed for each two hundred workwomen. For eight weeks before and eight weeks after childbirth the mother was exempted from work. A Palace of Motherhood was established in different centers. The children instead of the wealthy were given the first claim upon such "luxuries" as milk and fruit. By the housing law the rich man lost his right to ten or twenty rooms or as many dwellings. On the other hand a dozen families gained for the first time the right to fresh air, light and decent dwellings. Not only was their health better, but they gained in self-respect and dignity. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, basing itself on the multitudes, sought to nourish multitudes of sound, clean bodies, brains and consciences. The Bolsheviks were working for the future.

Having destroyed the main foundations of the old bourgeois order, they now faced the infinitely more trying task—the construction of a new order. They had to build it anew in every department, to build it from the bottom up, to build it out of the ruins of the past, to build it while beset and bedevilled on every side.

No one can exaggerate the magnitude of the task of reorganizing a new society. Some of the obstacles I glimpsed in one department—the military. Trotzky had just flung into the face of General von Hoffman his: "You are writing with the sword on