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The silly argument of Bolshevik apologists that the Red Terror was either: (1) the consequence of "Counter-revolutionary" movements, or (2) the excesses of a "nation of slaves," brought by long years of oppression to a pitch of exasperation that found a vent in crimes and horrors, is easily proved a base invention, for the reasons that: (1) the Terror was planned, written about and advocated, by the Bolsheviks before they came into power. (2) The tortures and massacres are arranged and executed by the "Chezvyckaikas" (extraordinary commissions for fighting counter revolution) who employ for this purpose not the ordinary peasant, but criminals, murderers and low-class Chinese mercenaries; and the peasants themselves, after the virtual extermination of that small proportion of the population which contained the "other classes," have always been the chief victims.

As apologists have so often, and still do, attempt to defend their Bolshevik or Jacobin heroes by accusing the mass of the people of the loathsome crimes which the Bolshevik leaders themselves planned, it is of interest to note the close parallels existing between the terroristic régimes of the Bolsheviks, and of the Jacobins of France in 1793. In the latter country, as Mrs. Webster remarks in her able history of the French Revolution, anarchy and terror were deliberately planned and brought about as the result of a policy long previously decided upon. "The members of the Triumvirate that headed the Mountain were agreed in regarding a period of anarchy as necessary to the realization of their vision, and were therefore content to work together in order to destroy