and cruelty, prohibiting the truth as to the marauding character of the war to be spoken.
But those who cannot co-ordinate illegal forms of the struggle with legal ones are very poor revolutionaries. It is not at all difficult to be a good revolutionary once the revolution has already broken out—when all and everyone joins the revolution from mere enthusiasm, because it is the fashion, sometimes even from considerations of personal gain. It costs the proletariat labor, great labor and I may say excruciating pains, to rid itself after the victory of these pseudo-revolutionists. But it is far more difficult, and yet more valuable, to know how to be a revolutionary, even when conditions are yet lacking for direct, general, truly mass, and truly revolutionary action; to be able to defend the interests of the revolution by propaganda, agitation and organization, in non-revolutionary institutions and often times in downright reactionary surroundings, amongst masses that are incapable of immediately understanding the necessity for revolutionary methods. To be able to find, to sense, to determine the concrete plan of still incomplete revolutionary methods and measures, leading the masses to the real, decisive, final, great revolutionary struggle—this is the chief problem of modern Communism in Western Europe and America.
Take, for example, Britain. We cannot know, and no one is capable of predicting truly, how soon a real proletarian revolution will break out there, and what, more than any other, will be the cause which will awaken and inflame the now slumbering masses to revolution. It is therefore incumbent upon us to carry on our preparatory work so as to be "shod on all four feet," as the late Plekhanoff was wont to say, when he was yet a Marxist and a revolutionist. Possibly it will be a parliamentary crisis which will "break the ice"; possibly it will be a crisis resulting from the hopelessly confused colonial and imperialist antagonisms, which become more and more painful and acute from day to day; possibly from some quite unseen third cause. We are not speaking of which struggle will decide the fate of the proletarian revolution in England—this question does not rouse any doubts in the minds of Communists, this question for all of us is decided and decided finally—we
