Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/40

 of property that belongs morally, if not legally, to the State, having been permitted to grow up in the belief that what the law sanctioned must necessarily be right, is not quite fairly treated if he is quite suddenly turned into the streets without resources, and his property confiscated.

One would not dispute for a moment the principle that nobody should possess luxuries or even superfluous comforts until the elementary needs of everybody have been amply satisfied and secured; or that a royal palace is put to much better use when it shelters many industrious persons than when it houses a king's mistress and her lackeys. But there is a difference as great as between black and white and right and wrong, between the declared will of the majority of the citizens acting through their National Assembly or Parliament which, in the interest of the community dispossesses an individual but secures the future of his wife and children as well as himself, and the arbitrary action of the minority in power, who roughly confiscate without consideration for the dispossessed.

"Where is the owner of this beautiful house?" I asked several times, but I could get no reply. Nobody knew. I heard the story of a Princess Narishkin who was doing good work for the children under the Soviet, but do not know if it was true. One heard so many contradictory