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Vilna, and are favored by mild weather. Their advance guards are said to be orderly, well clothed and well armed. They have committed no depredations except where they met with resistance.

And here is another from Berlin, Feb. 15, 1919, which gives us the real reason for the world-wide dread of the Bolsheviki. Ralph Rotheit, correspondent of the Berlin "Vossische Zeitung," visited the Bolshevik line at Vilna.

He pictured the situation as extremely pessimistic, although so far the Bolsheviki have always been defeated by the Germans whenever they ventured skirmishing. However, Rotheit writes, the Bolsheviki do not rely so much on fighting as on corrupting opponents by never-ceasing wireless propaganda, and by sending emissaries into the districts still occupied by the Germans, and by Bolshevik literature with which the latter's positions are flooded. Rotheit says unfortunately the effect of this propaganda at Kovno, headquarters of the German commander, was only too evident, as in many other places on German territory, as well as the Russian and Polish.

Here we have the real quarrel with the Soviets, the real reason why they must not, cannot be permitted to survive. They are propagandists; day and night they agitate, they preach and they print—and for some reason, the more loudly we proclaim that their propaganda is false, the more deeply we seem to dread its success! Since when have we lost our faith in the might of truth? Since when have we decided that error must be fought with bullet and machine-gun? Surely there must be some dark secret here, some skeleton in our family closet!

The truth is that we have seen in Russia a gigantic strike, an I. W. W. strike, if you please; and it has been successful. The workers have seized the factories, and now we call for the militia to drive them out. The very existence of capitalism depends upon their being driven out; as the phrase is, they must "be made an example of." And so the capitalist press is called in, our great lying-machine is given the biggest job in its history. The Associated Press does for Russia precisely what Charles Edward Russell showed it doing for Calumet, what I showed it doing for Colorado. All our newspapers, big and little, do what they are accustomed to do whenever there is a strike in America—telling everything evil about the strikers and nothing good about them, clamoring for violence against them, justifying every crime committed against them in the name of "law and order."

Recently the Soviets, pressed by starvation, have bowed so