Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/28

2 on the tenth of August, 1920, a few weeks following the convention, addressed a powerful note to the Italian Government giving reasons why America refused to have anything to do with the Soviet dictatorship. The chief reasons given by Mr. Colby were (1) the unrepresentative and anti-democratic character of the so-called Soviet Government and (2) the utter unreliability it had shown in all international relations, including statements by its leading officials that they did not intend to be bound by their own pledges to "bourgeois" governments.

The Bolshevists' answer was to increase their public and underground labors in this country. In the United States as in all European countries, as well as China, Persia, India, Turkey, Mexico and even in South America, Soviet agents have been repeatedly caught carrying vast sums for the purposes of propaganda. While Russian agriculture is degenerating for the lack of plows and even of sickles and scythes; while the laboring class is starving from the degeneration of agriculture; while the railroads are falling to pieces and three-fourths of the children are out of school, the Soviet finds ample means for vast expenditures not only for propaganda but for military attacks, such as those recently made on the democratic labor government of Georgia and her neighbors. This money has been taken from Russia's dwindling gold reserve and the few other mobile assets such as jewels, art treasures, platinum and foreign securities, which might have been used as a basis for restoring her credit and setting up a currency system at such time as the government became civilized.