Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/155

 It is, at the best, an attempt by a few men to compel the people of Russia to have what in their opinion is good for them. It may very well be that what they seek to impose and the methods by which they seek to impose it will in some ways benefit a lethargic race, unused to the ways of freedom. I express no opinion on the point, beyond saying this: That the argument of unfitness to manage one's own affairs has a very familiar ring about it to women. It was the favourite argument against granting the vote to women of a certain class of English opponent. Our good was sought, not our freedom.

But though the freedom was denied for so long, the good lingered also; and the Russian people might reasonably protest, and in many cases do protest, that there the good is lingering also. The great and fundamental question for all who are thinking seriously about these things is this: Has a handful of brilliant and thoughtful men, however good and sincere they may be, the moral right to enforce upon a whole community the system they believe in but the community as a whole rejects, with all the tyranny and cruelty such dictatorship must inevitably mean? Had the men of Russia the moral right to break up their own National Assembly, however inadequate and faulty, thereby bringing upon their country civil war and alien aggression, for the sake of a theory however magnificent?