— 4 —
fore; and these magnates were transforming even the freeest republics into financial monarchies. Before the war this fact was openly recognised for instance by even such non-revolutionary writers as Lizes in France.
This domination of a handful of capitalists had reached its full development when the entire world was divided by the biggest capitalists, not only in the sense of the seizure of the various sources of raw material and means of production, but also in the sense of completion of the preliminary division of colonies. Some forty years ago it was estimated that somewhat more than two hundred and fifty millions of the population of the colonies was subject to six capitalist powers. Before the war of 1914 there were in the colonies already about six hundred million people, and if we add such countries as Persia, Turkey, China which were then already reduced to a semi-colonial status we will get in round figures one thousand millions of people who were oppressed by the richest, the most civilised and freeest countries through colonial dependence. And you know that besides direct dependence in point of rights, the colonial dependence presupposes a whole series of dependent relations of a financial and economic character. It implies a whole series of wars which were not considered as wars, because they frequently assumed the character of a slaughter when European and American Imperialist troops, armed with the most perfect means of extermination, massacred harmless and defenceless people of the colonial countries.
The first Imperialist war of 1914–1918 grew inevitably from this division of the whole world, from this domination of capitalist monopoly, from this unlimited power of a mere handful of the biggest banks, say, two to five in each country. This war was waged over the question of the division of the entire world. It was waged over the question as to which one of two groups of the biggest States—the British or the German—should secure the opportunity and the right of robbing, crushing and exploiting the entire world. And you know that the war settled this question in favour of the British group. As a result of this war all capitalist contradictions have become immeasurably more acute. The War at one blow placed nearly a quarter of a billion people in a state which is equal to that of a colony. In such a:state it placed Russia, the population of which must be estimated at one hundred of twenty millions, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, in which countries there are no less than one hundred and twenty million people, That is to say,
