A prize of £5 was offered for a character-sketch of

Stalin taken from either C'arlyle's " Russian Revolution," or Gibbon's " Decline and Fall of the Russian Empire," or Macaulay's " Essay on Com- munism."

There were fewer entries than I had hoped for, and competitors evidently found it difficult to sustain for more than a sentence or two the style of their chosen historian. On the whole, Carlyle proved the most amenable to imitation, and Macaulay the least ; there were some goodish echoes of Gibbon, though his bland irony and impish humour were both lacking, and no competitor was inspired to emulate his entertaining footnotes.

From the more successful of the sketches I culled the following extracts :— CARLYLE Lenin-loyal, Kremlin-hungry, the People's friend is no Puritan. What matters though Czarist corpses tumble towards his boots implacable ? He pulls from his pocket not a revolver but a pipe ; fills it, spits ; whither ? Into the Infinite : and now, smoke-happy as the Everlasting Bonfire, he gives an Everlasting Puff."

(ROGER TILL).

" His road has led him hitherward, and no otherward . . . He is as cold as the frosty Caucasus whence he sprang, where Prometheus suffered for Man : as dark-inscrutable as his Georgian forests."

(FRANK MILTON).

MACAULAY

The many edifices devoted to the pursuit of material wealth that now greet the gaze of the astonished traveller from Muscovy to Sakhalien may be counted sufficient memorial to the man whose name is associated with this transformation. Yet there is probably not one of the myriad humble peasants, whose blood and lives purchased such wealth, who would not count the fame of Stalin

too dear at the price of universal abhorrence." (J. E. BROWN).

" But the man of violence, the man, as he called himself, of steel, did not on occasion disdain to employ the softer arts of publicity. The Soviet sheets were rarely empty of pictures of the dictator smiling paternally over a little maid in the Ukrainian wheatfields . . . "

(E. BEDWELL).

GIBBON

" He preserved amid a storm of idealism a natural distaste for ideals : and amid the most vociferous assertions of concern for the

people, a silent concern for himself." (EDWARD BLISHEN).

As the hallowed inspirer of all enlightenment and instruction, he caused the archiveS of universal history and the postulates of science and art, to be falsified by fabrications which disclaimed the maxims of reason and rendered powerless the vital principles of humanity, virtue and veracity." (PiniEcus). " Stalin was sensible that mankind is governed by names ; nor was he deceived in his expectation that the people would submit to slavery, provid...d that they were respectfully assured that they still

enjoyed their freedom." (Mrs. EMILY NEILL). I recommend that the first prize be divided between W. Percival (Carlyle) and T. H. Bingham (Gibbon) (£2 each), and that a second prize of £1 be awarded to Percy Pigott (Carlyle). Honourable mention to Rev. N. S. Power (Carlyle), J. E. Brown, Guy Kendall and A. Macdonald (Macaulay), D. I. Beaumanoir Hunt and Mrs. E. Neill (Gibbon).

FIRST PRIZES

(WALTER PERCIVAL)

No Simulacrum here ! Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Stalin. What has this Georgian not seen and tried ! From drill- sergeants to prime ministers, to foreign and domestic conspirators, all manner of men he fias seen. All manner of men he has gained, that wild unconquerable one. In his forty years' struggle against Despotism he ha, gained the gloridus faculty of self-help, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare union : this man can live self-sufficing yet lives also in the life of other men ; can make men love him, work with him ; a born king of men.

He can joke,. this Stalin : " Ho-ho ! The Pope ? How many divisions has he ? " But a man of steel ! Consider his purge of the Russian Army. Of high-ranking officers how many were shot in 1937? Not scores, not hundreds, but thousands l Or who can count the Kulaks slain when the policy of Collective Farms was so ruthlessly enforced ? Millions were they, slaughtered, says he to Churchill, by their own peasants.

Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Comrade Stalin. In simple soldier's tunic without decorations, he steps along: FOur years' of glorious struggle against the embattled might of Nazidoth ; then victory over that, and like a Colossus he 4testrides Europe. Pass on, thou questionable Josef Stalin, the grea%est of them all ; in the whole of the Soviets, in the whole Nation there is none like thee and none second to thee. (T. H. BINGHAM) No sooner had IosirVissarionovich assumed the precarious authority of his illustrious predecessor' than he gave signal proof of the justice with which he had been dubbed Stalin, the man of steel. Few men have been possessed of more unbending a will ; iew men have been granted more vast a field for the exercise of its dominion. Endowed by nature with a rare degree of dialectical skill, with an innate faculty for the con- ception and propagation of ideological • aphorisms designed for the enlightenment of the vulgar, and with a capacity for study that bore him unperturbed through many a midnight lucubration, Stalin endured to rule long after he had ceased to lead the teeming hordes of the barbaric Russian Empire, an autocratic position that accorded ill with the democratical creed he so earnestly claimed to profess. Unbiased by any theistic superstition, he dealt with friends and foes alike ; such are the incalculable advantages of living in a progressive country. Concealing his humanity behind the inscrutable mask imposed by his sovereignty, he displayed to the world only the unrelenting visage of his inexorable purpose.

SECOND PRIZE

(PERCY PIGOTT) Of Stalin, terror of kulaks, what shall we say ? Thousands look to him as to daydawn after arctic night. Is he stopping the leak through which riches flow away from toiling workers ? Upon what didst thou brood, 0 Renovator of Civilization, during thy sojourn in cold Siberian prisons ? Was it upon those many millions of weary beings and the secret police, ever vigilant ? What sort of a soul is enclosed within thy corporeal exterior ? Is it merely a blue sulphur glow vanishing in daylight ? Or has it permanency and some glimmer of Christian sentiment ? We have heard how, victory attained, allies, too guileless, were invited into Berlin and in due course therein blockaded. And also of an unspeakable discovery in the Katyn wood.

Yet it would be error to say this man was all Satan and falsehood, He is far other than an empty windbag. Within there is resolution and energy. His mother would have made him a priest. In vain thou doting mother ! Destiny had far other work for thy offspring, namely revolution among perils unnumbered and an empire at his feet.

Indeed we may truly say of this man, that, because of his unfaltering faith, he is to be numbered among those who have achieved.