Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/158

 132 All these little things of which I have spoken are repeated by thousands, by tens of thousands, and they create an atmosphere of scandalous unrest, of laziness and of criminal carelessness, for all that goes to make up the patrimony of the public.

In lieu of a conclusion to the above we may quote the expression of that Socialistic progressive who is President of Czecho-Slovakia, Professor Masaryk—an ardent admirer of the Russian people and a life long student at first hand of Russian affairs. President Masaryk says:

The economic conditions are getting rapidly worse. The leading Soviet railway expert calculates that it will take 25 years to put the Russian railways back into shape. But to accomplish regeneration even in this period would require A1 credit abroad and a high degree of efficiency at home. As long as efficiency, according to Bolshevist reports, ranges from 20 to 70 per cent of the low pre-war level and credit approaches zero, regeneration is impossible and progressive degeneration—as Hughes and Hoover state—must continue. According to official Bolshevist reports mines are in a worse state than the railways and the basic iron and steel industries are in a still more complete condition of collapse. Under these conditions the few hundred foreign locomotives that can be paid for are but a drop in the bucket. The slight improvements reported amount to nothing in com-