Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/16

 rest and prosecution of the Bolsheviks even before there was a single charge against a single Bolshevik.

The people desire peace. But the revolutionary government of free Russia has resumed the war of annexations, on the basis of those very, secret treaties which the former Tsar Nicholas II concluded with the English and French capitalists, aimed at the spoliation of foreign nations by the Russian financial magnates. These secret treaties have never yet been made public. The government of free Russia has entrenched itself behind wiles and tricks, but it has not yet proposed a just peace to all nations.

Bread there is none. The menace of famine is imminent. It is an open secret how the capitalists and the rich loot the treasury on war orders (the war costs the people 50,000,000 roubles a day! They reap enormous profits from the high cost of living, and absolutely nothing is being done toward improving the production and distribution of goods by and for the working class. The capitalists are mere and more daring in locking out the workmen, throwing them on the street at a time when the people suffer from underproduction.

The overwhelming majority of the peasants throughout a long series of conferences have loudly and unequivocally announced their decision to proclaim as a crying injustice,—nay more, as direct plunder—the ownership of the soil by the power-