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or literati. For example, I think that Vladimir Lenin is the greatest intellectual of this age, whether or not one agrees with his works. But he certainly was not a scholarly or literary man as his co-worker, the vain Leon Trotsky.

An American of Anglo-Saxon descent had been my true and tried friend at home and abroad, for over 25 years. He did not approve when I informed him that I intended to become a member of the Catholic Church. Said he, it is all right to work with the Catholics, if you think the Church is fighting against Communism, as undoubtedly it is. But membership in it would be a backward step. I said I was joining the Catholic Church for deeper reasons than its fight against Communism. I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and the principles of Catholicism, which I accept as a spiritual guide. After a lapse of time my friend replied: We are friends all the same. But when at the end of the war the former close allies began to cut one another's throat, I hazarded to say that I felt more sympathy for the Russian State than the British Empire, the Anglo-Saxon in my American friend leapt to the defense of the moribund anachronism of the British Empire. And he wrote to me that I was becoming Stalinized./

Of course, I have never been Stalinist or Trotskyist (as some imagine), Leninist or Marxist. About the middle of the nineteen-twenties, my erstwhile friend wrote a book in a kind of heavy German style, to prove Marxism a science. I laughed at him and said that Marxism was no science (though millions may imagine it is); it was merely a theory. But I have known people to lose all self-restraint and perspective, trying to prove that a theorem is a truth or a science.

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I visited Russia in the early years of the Revolution, which I believe was inevitable. But I have never been a protaganist for or against Soviet Russia. And even if I were against the Russian Revolution, I think not I could have success opposing it than the re-actionary opponents of the French Revolution. Marat, Danton and Robespierre died, Napolean made an empire of it, but the French Revolution zigzagged along. Its ideas created the United States and the South American republics and shook and changed all the thrones of Europe, except Russia and Great Britain. And so whatever Mr. Trotsky did or Mr. Stalin does, neither of them is big enough to destroy the Russian Revolution. But being man-made, of course, it may be perverted. I have never thought that there was Communism in Soviet Russia. What exists there is State Monopoly and control of the means of production and the distribution of commodities. And this is quite different and difficult, certainly not as easy as the "free enterprise" of Democracy. If I were in search of true Communism, I would go to the monasteries of the Catholic Church, whose beginnings are older than the Church, more antique than the Republic of Rome, as ancient as Ancient Egypt.

I wrote about my Russian journey in my book, A Long Way From Home.... Reading Karl Marx & Engels and visiting Russia, never once made me a believer in the theory of Class Warfare. For the Class War is inhuman and I am not Inhuman. That one group of people should exterminate others of the same group is more inhuman than national or racial wars. Jesus Christ said that the working man is worthy of his hire: He never said that he alone should rule the world. And I don't imagine the working man wants to. It is the politician and the intellectual battening on the united body of the

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working-man who desire this.

I heard Lenin in his last great speech in Moscow say:
We have made mistakes. And I, in my little way, agreed with Lenin and
felt that the Bolsheviks were making many mistakes. I thought that
they might have put more energy into the building up of their own
country, instead of spending the peoples' assets on propaganda to
make other nations "Communist". I remember a conversation I had in
Moscow with the first elected Communist member of the English Parlia-
ment. I had met him previously in London. He was a man who was quite
a statistician and had written articles and pamphlets exposing the
interlocking and movements of British and American trusts. I said I
thought the Bolsheviks were wasting the Russian peoples' assets by
giving their gold away. He replied that if the gold were given away,
it would help to weaken the international bankers. But I could not
agree, when gold is actually an invaluable commodity. But, of course,
I was not a statistician: I like to imagine that one of the mistakes
Lenin might have thought about was the spending of vast amounts of
the Russian peoples' wealth to force social revolutions in other
countries. Anyway, the Bolsheviks must have learned a few things,
because before sending their ships to Spain, they made the Republi-
cans deposit the Spanish gold reserve in Moscow.

And the bolshevising of Europe came about naturally enough,
without Russian funds, when, caught in their own toils, the smart
men of Paris, London and New York could do no less than support
Soviet Russia to destroy Nazi Germany. Brutal as it was, Bolshevism
was arrested in Western Europe in 1919, when the junkers murdered
Karl Leibnecht and Rosa Luxembourg. But when the victors attempted
to make an African colony of the most highly-civilized and expertly
technical nation in Europe, they created Hitler and opened wide the

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road of Bolshevism in Europe. It is said that, Whom the Gods would destroy... and History repeats....

When Julius Ceasar was reaching forth to make of Rome a dictatorship and an empire, even the great Cicero, supported by lesser tribunes, orated pompously and bombastically about maintaining the Republic, which was already reduced to a name only, a shell of its former glory. So instead of living it, we Americans talk and shout Democracy, as if it were the one God-ordained system of government. Would the English care to change their monarchial form of government to our Republican? And the Swedes, the Danes, the Norwegians? When we export Democracy will we also export our Divorces and Comic Strips, our Slang and Swing music, our Gangsterism and Lobbies, our Mistreatment of Minorities and Lynchings? Only the Nazis in Europe were so enamoured of our civilization that they wanted to reduce the status of half a million German Jews to fifteen million American Negroes. But because we are rich and powerful and craving more, our Protestant materialistic state of mind is pushing us on to impose our political system on the world.

> O wad some power the giftie gie us
> To see oursel's as others see us.

Already our liberal frauds and radical turn-costs are jumping on the new band wagon of American White Supremacy, bearing the American Way of Life. I would suggest that if we should first clean out the Augean stables of our own backyard, the world might instead of fearing and trembling before us, might learn to respect and try to imitate. Is it impossible to set our scientists to solve our social problems, instead of devising destructive instruments to destroy the

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world? But, perhaps, such scientific research would not harmonize
with the investments and privileges of Free Enterprise. While we have
extended ourselves to Russia's Asiatic back door in Japan, Korea and
China, and are blocking her European front door in the Mediterranean,
we are filling the air with shouts of Russian Expansionism and Imperialism.
The United States may be fit, perhaps, to lead the world of
Europe, but if it continues to maintain its morbid prejudice
against human color, the people of Asia and Africa will consider the
United States unfit to rule them.

Our liberals and radicals echoed the false cry of Wendell
Wilkie's "One World". But anybody who was thinking a little must have
been aware that there could be no "one world" in the Wendell Wilkie's
sense of American "free enterprise" and Russian State monopoly, just
as there could be no reconciliation between the British Empire system
and the Nazis' barter system. But being vain we really imagined that
Russia would rush to scrap her harsh way of life for our easy way of
life, where the international banker is lord and the travelling fief,
be he reactionary, liberal or radical, may readily cash his cheque in
Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Rome and Istanbul,
Cairo, Capetown and Sydney. I can see nothing wrong about a planned
economy. Thousands of years ago they planned in Egypt, when a pharoah
dreamed about the seven fat years and the seven lean years, and Joseph,
the Alien, interpreted his dream. If the richest country in the world,
America had planned beforehand, it might have avoided a ten-year depression and a second world war.

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I must confess to being an iconoclast and very much