The Washington times., 1920-12-19
Shaw No1u In Despair
For u. s. and Britain;
Puts Hope In Lenir,

starvation there, besides repelllng
invasion, defeating rOyalists and re-
action, and enabling huge peasant
majority to enjoy a freedom and
prosperity unknown to them before,
whilst capitalist statesmen of the
west have been creating unemplOy-
ment, waste, and sedition out of vic
tory and peace.
But this Russian exploit, astonish-
ing and admirable as it has been,
has been imposed by 100000 Marx
ian doctrinaires on 100 100000 OF
Russians, by a very little reasoning
and a great deal of shooting, helped
by a capitalistic foreign opposition
so ignorant and stupid that it has
forced Lenin's Russian opponents to
support him periodically lest their
country should be overrun, ravaged,
and replunged into chaos by subsi-
died brigand -adventurers.
FREEDOM FROM
FOREIGN PRESSURE
If this foreign pressure were re-
moved and spontaneous capitalism
given a fair start on the basis of
redistribution of the land effected by
the Bolshevists, it would probably re-
establish with a new and, even at
first, an extraordinary vigor, lease
of life, in spite fthe concessions it
would have to make to the state and
to the proletariat to conciliate the
new communistic mentality.
There is no sign of any serious
revolution being induced in west
Russia, as an example, nor is there
likely to be, because Russian condiH
tons for it do not exist in the west.
If defeated, desperate, starving,
demOralized, the United States army
had rolled back home with arms in
its hands, only to find America hope
lessly blOckaded and her means of
production i'm ruins, no doubt the
American Government would have
been swept away, and after brief
attempt by honest and innocent Mr..
Debs to ride the whirlwind on
democratic horse, a few determined
dOctrinaires of the professional class
would have established a soviet state
of siege and put the lOOters and hOOt-
ers, democrats and reactiOnaries,
gasbags and assassins, against the
wall to be shot first and tried after
ward.
AS it is, there is no response to
Lenin, except the foulest abuse of
him and savagely cruel retaliation
in Hungary for defeated attempt
at a soviet there.
CAPITALISM
BLOCKING CIVILIZATION
Mr.. Wells had therefore to point
out to Lenin that, though the capital
lists, being educated to get rich quick
individually and leave the public to
look after tself, are as incompetent
politically as Lenin alleges them to
be, and therefore cannot save civili-
cation, they are powerful enough to
prevent any one else from saving it.
In that way they can wreck it,
and so far as history is known to us,
this is what has always happened in
the past.
Mr.. Wells, in a combination OF
magnificent pamphlets, a vitality
needed school book, which he has
just issued as an outline Of worlds
history, has pointed out that the
crash of the old Roman civilization,
like that of the half dozen other
famous civilizations which crashed
before it, was brought about not by
invading barbarians but by the in
ternal strains of upset capitalism,
and these are just the strains that
are splitting Europe today and'being
intensified intolerably by the deter
mination of European governments,
notably the British government, to