with the latest developments of Western Socialism, and expert in revolutionary tactics among the masses. If it had not been for the experience gained in these grand general manoeuvres of 1905, both the bourgeois February revolution of 1917, and the -proletarian October revolution of the same year, might have failed.

Still a fourth reason helps to explain why the present movement has its home in Russia. That country's geographical position enables it to defend itself easier and for a longer period longer period than any other country against the military invasions and economic aggressions of more highly developed capitalist governments. In the fifth place, the peculiarly close relationship of the proletariat with the peasantry in Russia made it easy to convert a bourgeois revolution into a Socialist revolution, by assisting the urban proletariat to get into direct touch with the half-proletarian poorer classes in the country. In the sixth place, and last of all, long practice in labor agitation abroad and experience derived from propaganda among the working classes in Western Europe, made it possible when the sudden crisis actually arose in Russia, to bring into being at a stroke that perfect instrument of revolutionary organization - the Soviet.

Naturally, this analysis is not exhaustive, but it is sufficient for our present purposes.

So Soviet or proletarian democracy has its birthplace in Russia. It represents another stage in evolution, following upon the Paris Commune. The Proletarian Peasant Soviet Republic has proved to be the first Socialist government in the world's history capable of maintaining itself. It is a new type of state destined not to disappear.

In order to complete the work of

Socialist reconstruction, much remains to be done. Soviet republics in countries with a higher civilization, where the true proletariat is more numerous and influential than in Russia, have every prospect of speedily overtaking the latter country when they have once started on the road toward proletarian dictatorship.

The insolvent Second International is already dead. So far as its spectre still stalks abroad, it is as a handmaid of the international bourgeoisie. It is a yellow international. Its more important intellectual leaders, like Kautsky, glorify bourgeois democracy, which they call 'real' democracy, or still more stupidly, 'pure' democracy.

Bourgeois democracy has had its day, just as the Second International has had its day, having performed a necessary historical service and served as an intermediate stage in the preparation of the laboring classes for their ultimate victory.

Even the most democratic bourgeois republics from their very nature never have been, and never can be in the future, anything else than machines for oppressing the workers through capitalism, political instruments of capital,- dictatorships of the middle classes. Democratic bourgeois republics proclaim the authority of majorities; but they are impotent to give majorities real power, so long as private property and private ownership of the means of production continue.

The liberty of the bourgeois democratic republics was, in fact, the liberty of the rich. The proletariat and the laboring peasantry were enabled and compelled under its régime to rally their forces for the overthrow of capital, to supplant bourgeois democracy, and to assure themselves that real democracy which labor never can enjoy under the rule of capital.

For the first time in the history of

the world, a Soviet or proletarian democracy has created a democracy of the masses of the working people, of the laborers and the small peasantry,

Never before in history has there been a government truly representing the majority of the people, and rendering effective the actual power of this majority, except the Soviet.

Nothing indicates more clearly the intellectual bankruptcy of the leaders of the Second International, of men like Helferding and Kautsky, than their inability to comprehend the true significance of Soviet or proletarian democracy, its relation to the Paris Commune, its place in history, and its necessity as the form which a dictatorship of the proletariat must inevitably

assume.

In a recent issue of Die Freiheit, the organ of the Independent Socialists of Germany, an address is published 'To the Revolutionary Proletariat of Germany.' It is signed by the party executive, and by all the members of its delegation in the National Assembly. It

To reconcile a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with a dictatorship of the proletariat! What a naïve idea! What a stroke of Philistine genius! We have already suffered from the fact that during Kerensky's régime the coalition of Mensheviki and Social Revolutionaries who were really a group of petty-bourgeois democrats imagining themselves Socialists — tried that very experiment. Any reader of Marx who fails to understand that so long as capitalist society exists every serious conflict between the classes will eventuate either in an exclusive dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or an exclusive dictatorship of the proletariat, shows his incapacity to understand either the economic or the political reasoning of our great leader.

'GENTLEMEN,' said the President, 'I have the pleasure of introducing Mr. McFormic, who will read his report. Kindly give it careful attention.' It was in a salon in the marble palace of a great Fifth Avenue millionaire in New York, where a small company of seven gentlemen were assembled. They were the rulers of

America, and soon to be the rulers of the world. Mr. McFormic, whom the President presented, was still a young man in the early thirties. He had strong features and a determined chin. His slim waist and broad hips and shoulders gave him an ant-like appearance that accorded curiously with his name. The gentlemen present

"Gentlemen, the moment has come to make America the mistress of the world. Although but a short time ago people thought that capitalism had played its rôle, and, indeed, that fancy took complete possession of men during the last World War, it

is none the less becoming clearer every day that the capitalist system is still only at the threshold of its ultimate conquests. It is a law of development known to every student of world economics that an institution does not decline until after it has reached its highest form of development, and a succeeding institution has arisen to take over its inheritance. The fact that all claimants for capital's inheritance that have hitherto appeared reveal themselves incapable of administering it, is of itself sufficient proof that our system has not yet reached its ultimate development. But we need hardly go that far; for the war, and what has followed the war, prove that capitalism is sure to rule the coming age.

'Let me first of all dispose of its competitors. Socialism claimed for a moment to be the heir of capitalism. However, both before and during the Great War it proved itself to be but a paper currency without a gold backing

a philosophy of happiness which in its ultimate analysis was based upon capitalism - for without money Socialism could not go forward, and without the guidance and aid of the trained brains which run capitalist machinery, its own machinery collapsed. We have now learned that Socialism without capitalism to use Marx's words, "without stored-up labor" is a machine without matter, a transcendental doctrine without substance. It survives only so long as

murder. We now have in the Lenin experiment an object lesson which has detoured the economic theories of the masses from Marxism, through Bolshevism, back to capitalism, and, indeed, to capitalism in its highest terms. The main fact that Lenin has already had to drop his theory of the superiority of physical labor and call to his support the brains of the bourgeoisie, and the further fact that he was soon compelled to concede the right of private property to millions of peasants, and the final fact that since his followers would not work he had to substitute a twelve-hour for a sixhour day, all combine to prove to the world the failure of the Bolshevist doctrine, if not of Bolshevism itself. The reasons for this failure lie in the very character of capital.

'If capital is precipitated labor, capital in solution must again become labor; and since the latter is not a final product, but more or less a means to an end, it inevitably returns to capital. This larger circle of economic action embraces smaller circles. Air can be compressed into a liquid, and this liquid may again become a gas. Heat is converted into motion, and motion into heat. These are closed circles in the reaction of force and matter. But heat can never become matter, and one form of matter never becomes another form of matter. Labor necessarily converts itself into capital, and capital into labor. When you abolish capital, labor ceases. We have seen this immutable law of nature demonstrated in our recent history, and we must draw the inevitable conclusions that follow.

'Consequently, capitalism, instead of being abolished, has received its final theoretical demonstration. It has been proved with convincing force that mankind will starve unless capital