worn out before a new one could be bought. Articles of adornment and the necessities of life were on sale in the shops and bazaars, but at such prices that only the rich could buy. If the Bolshevik programme came upon Russia too hastily, it is true to add that the return to "prosperity" was also too rapid. The people grumbled.
Bolshevism Preferred to Reaction.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the Czecho-Slovaks should after three months have found their position on the Volga and in the Samara government to be untenable, and that they should have been forced to retire because of grave discontent among the people. Faced with the alternative of Bolshevism or a Government which they considered both oppressive and reactionary, it was not unnatural that the people should prefer Bolshevism, because, though it might spell chaos, it did permit a degree of freedom for opinions, and its programme included projects, such as those dealing with education, which the people considered of vital importance.
When I was discussing Bolshevism with peasants last April they used to say to me: "How do we know whether it is good or bad? It will need to be tried for ten or twenty years." And when I expostulated and said that our Governments changed more rapidly than that, they were wont to reply that that surely indicated that the political intuitions of the English were more acute than theirs. It is clear that the unfair impatience of those who screened their Government behind the Cossacks and the Czechs, and who overthrew the Bolsheviks, was also shared by those who in October, 1918, turned out the new Government and embraced Bolshevism again. For the new régime had not had time to prove its worth, and had this to its credit, that it expended a great deal of energy in re-establishing the railway service, in opening the banks, and in placing the large business concerns on a different basis. Those who had tolerated the confusion of the Bolsheviks should not have been too exacting in their demands on the new Government. The débris of an old system littered the path of the Bolsheviks in their task of regeneration; no less did the débris resulting from Bolshevism lie in the path of those who desired to see the old political system rebuilt.
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