Page:Education and Art in Soviet Russia (1919).djvu/12



When we read in the newspapers that people are being executed in hundreds by the Soviet government in Russia, that thousands are being assaulted and shot dead in the streets, or shooting themselves through fear and desperation, and when we read that the industrial disorganization is so great that the whole population is starving and people are dying at the rate of several hundred a day in Moscow and Petrograd, we feel that the condition in that land is desperate indeed. And yet that is merely a feeling, it is not a fact.

People are dying at the rate of two or three hundred a day on Manhattan Island alone. Many of them are dying from starvation. The president of the American Public Health Association is quoted as saying that 3,000,000 American children go hungry to school every morning. We commit 20 or 30 murders a day in the United States. We rob, rape and assault in proportion. We hang or electrocute a man or a woman every third day. Once in every four days we lynch, burn at the stake, or torture to death a defenseless human being without any pretense at legal procedure. The conditions of life in the United States are so appalling that our starved, desperate and degenerated citizens are committing suicide at the rate of one every half hour!

If a foreign correspondent should deliberately set out to tell all the bad things that can be told about the United States, and none of the good, he could, without any actual lying, make this country look like the bottom of the inferno. And that is exactly what the foreign correspondents in Russia have done—and besides doing that they have indulged in a stupendous and organized campaign of criminal lying. And if any correspondent has been impelled to do otherwise, his dispatches have been suppressed in transit or upon their arrival in this country. One such correspondent, a representative of the Associated Press, told me that 58 per cent of the dispatches he sent out from Moscow were suppressed by the British Government before they ever arrived on our shores. The rest of them were mangled or