REVOLUTION AND PUBLICITY.
THE Government have done well to let the public know more about the dealings of the revolutionary faction in this country with the Bolsheviks at Moscow. The police on Monday arrested an alien who had just left the house of Mr. Malone, M.P., in North London.
The alien was found to be carrying letters addressed to Lenin and Zinovieff, and a letter in cipher to the " Small Bureau, Third International," at Moscow. One of the letters to Lenin was signed by Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, the leader of the most violent of the various little Communist parties in Great Britain. Miss Pankhurst made no secret of her intentions. Her letter began :- " Dear Comrade,—The situation here is moving in a revolu- tionary direction more swiftly—but, of course, we are far away yet. The prices of necessaries are rising, but the cost of living is not totally supposed to have risen this month. Unemploy- ment is now acute, and the unemployed are restive. One of Lansbury's meetings was broken up by members of any party because he advised peaceful methods, and the crowd supported the young dockers, seamen, and others of my party who opposed him. Unemployed in various towns march to factories, enter them, make speeches and speak of using them. Ex-soldiers arm and drill. Do not exaggerate these things—they are not formidable yet. Unemployed smashed windows and stole jewels last Monday when the London mayors led them to Westminster. The Communist parties, alone, are neither big enough nor bold enough to rise to the occasion."
She went on to say that in the Dreadnought she " tried to set a bolder policy," but that she had been hampered by her arrest and release on bail, under a promise not to participate in the conduct of the paper before her trial. She added :— " I expect six months' imprisonment. I considered a hunger strike, but I am afraid that weapon is destroyed now since the Government is letting the Irish hunger-strikers die."
The admission of an expert agitator that hunger-striking has lost its efficiency is valuable. It is still more important that the public should see from this letter how the revolutionaries work in concert with the criminals at Moscow. Many good people decline to believe that any British men, to say nothing of women, seriously eon' template the possibility of doing in this country what Lemn and his colleagues have done in Russia—namely, to conduct a " heavy civil war " by murdering and robbing all who have the misfortune to be educated and the courage to resist the new tyrants. Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, for her part, supplies the proof that there are persons wicked enough to desire and to plan the ruin of our country. The letter, which was read at Bow Street on Tuesday, is at the same time reassuring. When the public is merey told in a vague way that revolutionaries are at work among us, it may either ridicule the suggestion or exaggerate
the danger. On the whole, we should do better to make too much, rather than too little, of such threats to our national welfare, so long as the true facts are withheld. But Miss Pankhurst's frank confession to her friend Lenin shows that " heavy civil war " and massacre do not form an attractive political programme for this country. She complains that the various little Communist sects will not unite, in obedience to the orders from Moscow, and that the British Socialist Party had tried to conceal the fact that those orders had been given. " Parliamentarism and the tameness of the B.S.P. crowd," she says, " are sore points with our party," who are, it seems, reluctant to work with such fainthearts. Moreover, Moscow has shown itself unappreciative of Miss Pankhurst's strenuous endeavours to reduce her mother-country to starvation and misery. She says :—
"I have had a most terrible struggle since I returned home. Our press where our paper is printed was suffering : (1) Because the Dreadnought owed money. (2) Because we had accounts to pay for type metal, and instalments to pay on machinery. (3) Ordinary trade fought a little shy of us on account of the Dreadnought being printed there. Whilst I was away an account ran too long ; a creditor got a writ of payment against us in the Court. Then all the creditors took fright. On my return the brokers were in twice in one week, and I have been fighting the situation ever since, writing to this and that person, borrowing, and loaded with debts of honour, some of which are (on) the point of disgracing me. The Third International in Moscow heard my plea when I was there and promised relief. It does not come. This week the South Wales Mining Comrades sent for 6,000 extra copies of the Dreadnought. 1 borrowed paper from the Herald—at present I have no paper for next week. It is not pleasant to go to prison so ! "
And in a plaintive footnote she adds :— " Yet I think the fates are very unjust. Need the struggle be so hard for some, whilst others only draw from the move- ment giving little in return 7 " It is creditable to Mr. Lansbury that he should lend Miss Pankhurst paper while she, for her part, sends roughs to break up his meetings. But it is curious that the Bolsheviks should have offered large sums of money to Mr. Lansbury, while Miss Pankhurst is left unaided to face unsympathetic brokers. We may remark that the Communists, who are sure of their capacity to make a new earth and, indeed, a new heaven, ought to set an example to the rest of us by showing themselves endowed to an exceptional degree with the ordinary human virtues. When they are seen to be very fallible mortals, excessively quarrelsome, shifty and ungrateful, the ordinary man may be excused for doubting whether they are the supermen who would bring in the Golden Age.
It will be generally agreed that the publicity given to this revolutionary intrigue has done much to check it. We are glad to find that the Times has given prominence to the letter and has not rebuked the Government for disclosing it. On Tuesday the Times expressed great indignation because the Irish Office had published a letter, found in the Cork City Hall at the time of the late Lord Mayor's arrest, and addressed to him as " 0.0. Cork No. 1," in which the rebel " Director of Munitions " asked the late Lord Mayor to report as to the manufacture of bombs--for use against the troops and police. The Times thinks that it was odious " to produce this letter because Mr. MacSwiney was not indicted on the charge of bomb- making. It was " odious," in other words, to reveal a little more of the evil doings of the suicide. Yet apparently it was not " odious," on the part of the Government, to divulge Miss Pankhurst's letter to Lenin, though no indictment was laid against her in that connexion.
We trust that the Government will continue to throw light on the workings of this international gang of plotters. The truth is the one thing that Bolsheviks fear the most. It is well known that Lenin has refused to allow a League of Nations Commission or a Commission from the Labour Section of the League to visit Russia and inquire into the working of his so-called " Soviet Government." The reports of the British and Italian Socialist delegates who have recently been in Russia show why Lenin declines to expose his new Utopia to the gaze of a few dispassionate experts. If the Socialists, who went to admire, came back disgusted, impartial observers would have a sorry tale to tell of the
" dictatorship of the proletariat " at work—or, rather, failing to work. If the ignorant Russian populace had knows as much about Bolshevism in 1917 as they know now, they would not have been tempted by Lenin's promise of Peace and Plenty, and would probably have preferred to remain even under the blundering despotism to which they were accustomed. It is highly desirable, then, that the civilized Governments, and especially our own, should let their peoples know all about the Bolshevik plottiuge. Publicity would compel the conspirators to walk warily, if it did not dishearten them. Moreover, if it were clearly under- stood that the Bolsheviks were planning a violent revolu- tion here and in other countries, no party would venture to demand that the British Government should enter into normal and friendly relations with them. The Labour Party has only been able to persist in this demand by pretending that the Bolsheviks were nice quiet people who had been much misrepresented by the " Capitalist " Press. But the Labour Party, however skilful it may be in manipulating news in regard to strikes, cannot keep up the pretence that the Bolsheviks are merely peaceful politicians with somewhat advanced views, when they are in fact subsidizing our revolutionary factious who seek to destroy all our institutions, including the Labour Party itself. The average man will judge the Bolsheviks by what he sees and knows of their doings here, and the Labour Party would be well advised, in its own interest, to repudiate Moscow and all its unholy works.
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