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480
REVOLUTION [chap. xxiv.
for gain, replied with insults and finally drove out
M. Kerensky and his friends with broomsticks, installing
Bolsheviks in their places. The latter at last made the
wished-for speech : " Comrades, we are all animated by
the same ideal and are all aiming at the same proximate
objects : ’ No more war ! Peace at any price! a peace
which will permit us immediately to enjoy all the good
things that you have won and that you are still
winning!’"
This speech was greeted with unanimous applause,
and with joyful heart they left for Brest-Litovsk.
The origin of the Revolution had warped its whole
character and course and led Russia down a natural
slope to the abyss in which she is still struggling.
If the sensible elements of the Provisional
Government had realised this in time they might perhaps have
been able to check the rapid progress of disorder and
political corruption. But alas! we all of us were,
just at the outbreak of the great cataclysm, under the
influence of suggestion and of strong poisons. We
believed in all good faith that the fakir and his silken
ladder could remain suspended in the air !
It was quite natural that after the Revolution had
triumphed in Russia the convicts and political exiles of
note should have agreed to meet together in the capital
of the regenerated country and should have enjoyed an
enthusiastic reception from their former associates.
But it was difficult to understand—for our Allies at least
—why in war time and when the journey between the
West and Russia was so difficult, so long and so costly,
we need have allowed the whole body and, alas! the
riffraff also, of our revolutionary emigrants to come back to
us from France, Switzerland, Italy ? It would have been
so easy and yet so rational to subsidise them liberally
on the spot until the end of the war and the resumption
of normal communications.
But it was just because those who were actually
organising the Revolution needed to reinforce the most
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