Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/118

 ment, as well as the cure of the attack of anarchy and political neurasthenia from which the country had suffered since the Revolution.

George Bernard Shaw has said, in that paradoxical style of his in which there is often so much truth: "If it be true that to win a war you must have a united omnipotent Government, it is no less true under present circumstances that if you want a united omnipotent Government you must have a war … if the Russian Revolution is to be saved from reaction, and the Russian Republic from disruption by the discontent of the working class and the diversity of the ideals of its own reformers, the revolutionary Government must fortify itself by a war, precisely as the French revolutionary Government had to do. If there were no war, it would have to make one.

"By a stroke of luck so fortunate that few good Churchmen will hesitate to describe it as providential, the Russian leaders are spared the necessity of cynically making war to save their country. The