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In spite of invidious comparisons by super-patriots between British sloth and Transatlantic promptitude, America took four times as many months as the British had taken weeks to put a hundred thousand men into the firing-line; and the Germans were transferring divisions very much faster from the Eastern to the Western front. The Bolsheviks had relieved them of all anxiety on that score.
The fact was well known that besides the valuable caches of unset diamonds, and other precious stones, coming surreptitiously into the country without yielding the customary heavy duty imposed on them, there was also being smuggled into the innumerable lonely bayous and inlets of the lengthy coast line vast quantities of contraband in violation of the eighteenth amendment, also batches of undesirable aliens like Chinese, anarchists and Bolsheviks, such riffraff as Uncle Sam had been holding off under a strict ban.
The removal of the conference to Stockholm would have meant the end of matters for us, for it would have been utterly impossible to keep the Bolsheviks of all countries from putting in an appearance there, and the very thing we had endeavoured with the utmost of our power to avoid from the start to have the reins torn from our hands and these elements take the lead would infallibly have taken place.
In the Soviet power gradually passed farther and farther to the left, from Social Revolutionaries to Mensheviks and from Mensheviks to Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin, whose return from exile in Switzerland was facilitated for its own purposes by the German Government.
Moreover, having, by hypothesis, converted a majority of the nation, a Communist Government could be sure of loyal help from immense numbers of workers, and would not be forced, as the Bolsheviks are in Russia, to suspect treachery everywhere.
It was considered good form in diplomatic circles, until the Genoa Conference, to pretend that there is no such country as Russia, but the Bolsheviks, with their usual wickedness, have refused to fall in with this pretence. Their existence constitutes an embarrassment to America, because in a quarrel with Japan the United States would unavoidably find themselves in unwilling alliance with Russia.
The Bolsheviks deliberately broke their word, and Trotsky issued an order to "all troops fighting against the anti-revolutionary Czecho-Slovak brigades" in which he said: "The concentration of our troops is complete. Our army being aware that the Czecho-Slovaks are direct allies of the anti-revolution and of the capitalists, fights them well. The Czecho-Slovaks are retreating along the railway.
There are many minorities besides Communists: religious minorities, teetotal minorities, militarist minorities, capitalist minorities. Any one of these could adopt the method of obtaining power advocated by the Bolsheviks, and any one would be just as likely to succeed as they are. What restrains these minorities, more or less, at present, is respect for the law and the constitution.
And you might add for the education of your people that Alaska is only thirty-seven miles from Bolshevik Siberia, and wireless messages are sent into Alaska by the Bolsheviks urging our people to rise against the Washington government. We've asked Washington for a few guns and a few men to guard Nome, but they laugh at us. Do you see a moral?"
Already, according to The Times correspondent in Peking, Outer Mongolia, a country about as large as England, France and Germany combined, has been conquered by Bolshevik armies and propaganda. The Bolsheviks have, of course, the enthusiastic sympathy of the younger Chinese students.
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