The horror of Russia was as necessary for the world’s education as the horror of Germany.
Mankind learns its lessons expensively, with infinite waste.
It could learn the utter wickedness of kaiserism and sultanism only by such a war as this.
It could comprehend the necessity of the United States of the World only by spending millions of lives and billions of dollars.
No persuasion of reason, no tutelage of peace, could convince humanity of its essential Oneness. The idea had to be blasted in.
And to get its real lesson in Democracy the human race needed the wild orgy of Bolshevism quite as much as it needed the madness of Prussianism.
For both teach the same truth.
And that truth is that GOVERNMENT BY CLASS IS EVIL AND ONLY EVIL.
Germany’s outbreak and its eventual collapse will show the crime, in all its hideousness, of government by a so-called upper class.
Russia’s red riot, its plunge into tyranny, assassination, famine, and bankruptcy, will show the crime of government by the so-called lower class.
Democracy is as much opposed to the one as the other.
Democracy faces both ways.
It opposes a tyranny by the Proletariat as firmly as it opposes a tyranny by the Aristocrat.
It stands for government of the people, by the people, for the people.
It has a place for every man; for the scholar, the clerk, the poet, and for the bricklayer, the farmer, and the engineer.
To say that the welfare of a nation depends upon those who labor with their hands is as much nonsense as to say it depends upon its lords and gentlemen.
It depends upon All.
Democracy means unity. It means Cooperation, Organization, Mutual Interdependence.
And lest the world, which likes to go to extremes, should imagine, in winning this war against its autocratic marauders, that Government by Kaisers, Kings, and Sultans is its only enemy, and that we shall have peace forever when they are overthrown, it had to be shown, in the lurid page of Russia, that Government by a tyrannical Proletariat is every whit as dangerous.
The one great everlasting stubborn and diabolical enemy of Democracy is CLASS, in whatever guise.
