Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/60

 44 Now the time has come when Russia, left to her own resources, must regenerate herself from within, if she would free herself from the crazy paranoiacs and parasites who are sucking her life's blood. We can only try to understand her troubles and help her, where we can, in regaining her national life. Though we have helped her little enough, she may yet have helped us, by teaching us to look to our own health, and to take early precautions against the disease through which she is passing. Thus we may learn to distinguish between the empty catch-words and decoy-cries and the motives and ills that cause them to become the powerful agents of destruction. There is no smoke without fire. Let us pay heed to the cries, not to the crazy remedies wrung from distracted brains.

The pages of history are blackened with the records of the misery and suffering men have created for themselves, of countless human holocausts as horrible and senseless as those of Dahomey, whose tortured victims have been destroyed—self-immolated, for the most part—on the altars raised to vain words and meaningless symbols. And still their crazy priests and fanatical votaries, mad with frenzy and drunk with blood, shriek for ever more victims, never content until the whole world is infected with their madness and rocks helpless in an orgy of self-destruction.