Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/218

204 common-sense talk that is based on experience is simply evidence of the capitalistic desire to recapture the proletariat. They meet the arguments of engineers and administrators with the contention that they themselves would run the railways, factories and mines so much better than the old managements that perhaps it might not be necessary for the respective personnels to work any more than six hours per day. Of course, we know that such talk is foolish. We know what has. been the result of the Russian experiment. A great difference between engineers and socialists is that the former act upon the basis of accumulated experience, while the latter refuse to recognize that such is of any value.

Travellers, senatorial and others, return from Russia with words of quasi-wisdom. The Bolshevik government has found itself and is a wonderfully efficient thing. The people are becoming happy. They are going to export grain. Etc., etc. Others dissent. In truth nobody knows what they are talking about. The daily papers publish the interviews with them, for even the words of an ass may be news. The editors offer neither indorsement nor criticism. It’s all the same to thein.

We laugh at the foreigner who comes to America, makes a hasty transcontinental trip, and essays to size up our economic position. Egad! We have some trouble in doing that ourselves. What then of the casual traveller in Russia, who knows neither the language nor the mysteries of a strange people? The expert sitting in London or New York, getting many reports and studying data, knows far more.