Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/3



When you first handed me your MS. on The World Significance of the Russian Revolution, you expressed a doubt about the propriety of its title. After a perusal of your work, I can assure you, with the best of consciences, that your misgivings were entirely without foundation. No better title than The World Significance of the Russian Revolution could have been chosen, for no event in any age will finally have more significance for our world than this one. We are still too near to see clearly this Revolution, this portentous event, which was certainly one of the most intimate, and therefore least obvious, aims of the world-conflagration, hidden as it was at first by the fire and the smoke of national enthusiasms and patriotic antagonisms. It was certainly very plucky of you to try and throw some light upon an event which necessarily must still be enveloped in mist and mystery, and I was even somewhat anxious, lest your audacity in treating such a dangerous subject would end in failure, or what is nearly the same, in ephemeral success. No age is so voracious of its printed offspring as ours. There was thus some reason to fear lest you had offered to this modern Kronos only another mouthful of his accustomed nourishment for his immediate consumption.

I was, I am glad to report, agreeably surprised,—surprised, though not by the many new facts which you give, and which must surprise all those who take an interest in