Page:The Descent of Bolshevism.djvu/15

 through the agencies of law and order, reestablishes on a higher plane the principles of justice and progress.

For, as a rule, a nation emerges stronger, morally and spiritually, from a revolutionary upheaval. With this single exception, however, all the movements of the world that sought to establish, by the dagger, the sword, the bayonet, the machine gun, or even by peaceful communities, a utopia on earth, have been doomed to failure.

The extremists, no matter how long and brilliant their temporary success, have gone the way of all political despots and all religious impostors. And their culpability is not in plunging a nation into anarchy and crime, but in debasing the ideals of utopia, by yoking them with the destructive agencies of negation in a people.

This is true of the ancient as well as the modern world, as I shall endeavor to show in these chapters, tracing the more prominent movements in history against the existing order of things. The only