Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/227

 Rh of the people themselves. The temptation proved too strong to effect a leap right over the dead level of unpreparedness with the help of enlightened despotism and the rod of Peter the Great shaped according to a new Communist fashion. Taking all this into consideration, it will, perhaps, be clear to you why in the tumultuous chaos of the revolutionary tempest, one part of the Russian Socialists so quickly and easily cast off the outward gilding of scientific Socialism, showing underneath the Asiatic nature of enlightened despotism with a Communist lining.

In spite of abundant evidence of this character contained in its report, the British Labor Delegation, being divided, took no decisive stand and made statements flatly contradicted not only by other delegations, but by some of their own delegates, as already noted. This led to further protest by the Socialist-Revolutionists represented in Paris by another leader known in all countries, O. S. Minor—a man, like the others, who has spent most of his life in prison or exile because of his socialistic and revolutionary opinions. Referring especially to the failure of the British Labor Party to do anything on behalf of the oppressed population of Russia, in particular the labor unionists and agriculturists, Minor said:

Still less can we understand how so many of the Socialists can, with a clear conscience, justify the methods of Bolshevism for Russia, at the same time rejecting them for their own countries. Such a view shows either a conscious or unconscious deep contempt for the Russian people, an insulting attitude toward them as towards a nation of slaves for whom the Communism of the Whip is the most appropriate, natural and national brand of Socialism.