Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/294

238 that ?" The words of the speaker were drowned in a storm of whistles and hisses.

Man does not live by bread alone. Neither does the Soviet live by satisfying merely the hunger of the stomach, but the hunger of the spirit.

All men crave fellowship. "For fellowship is heaven, and lack of it is hell," said John Ball to the English peasants in the fourteenth century. The Soviet was like a great family in which the lowest man was made to feel his human worth.

All men crave power. In the Soviet, workingmen felt the joy of being arbiters of their own destiny, masters over a vast domain. A workingman is like any other human being. Having tasted power he is loth to let it go.

All men crave adventure. In the Soviet men embarked upon a supreme adventure—the quest for a new society based on justice, the building of the world anew.

All men have a spiritual passion. It needs only to be aroused. The Revolution stirred up even the dull, complacent peasant. It gave him the impulse to read and write. One day an old mujik appeared in the Children's School.

"Children, these hands cannot write," he said, holding them up, toilworn and calloused, "they cannot write because the only thing the Czar wanted them for was to plough." As the tears flowed down his cheeks he said, "But you, the children of a new