MR. RAMSAY MACDONALD'S TWO VOICES.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—At the Aldwych Club on February 21st Mr. Ramsay MacDonald declared for himself and the Labour Party :—
" We have just as much to do with Bolshevism as with the man in the moon, except that we regard Bolshevism as a little more to us as an enemy than the man in the moon. We have not a thou- sandth millionth part of sympathy with the Bolshevist point of view."
Just before the General Election Mr. Ramsay MacDonald wrote in Forward (October 14th, -1922)
A good many of us, perhaps, have extravagant ideas of what a Labour Government could do in its first year or two of office, and hitherto we have had very little to guide us except.what programme we conceive we could carry out were there no opposition. I have been an unswerving hopeful regarding the Moscow Government, and have tried to save it from its friends ' and its enemies (including itself), and so I scrutinize with expectation its measures of real economic and political importance, so that when we humbler and more cautious Socialists come into office, we may find a way pre- pared for us which will lead us away from ' the bourgeois ideology ' and other sinister attachments which keep the comps. busy on
Communist literature." •
Is it too much to ask Mr. Ramsay MacDonald to explain which of these statements expresses his real sentiments ?—I am,
Sir, &c., REGINALD WILSON, General Secretary. British Empire Union, 9-10 Agar Street, Strand, London, TV .C. 2.
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