A dim recognition of this truth has helped to inspire the procedure of the two most recent manifestations of the revolutionary spirit. I refer to bolshevism and to fascism. It is proper, I believe, to talk of them as one phenomenon for their fundamental similarities, as most everyone but the bolshevists and the fascists themselves has noted, are much greater than their superficial differences. They were attempts to cure the evils resulting from the breakdown of a somewhat primitive form of capitalism. In neither Russia nor Italy had modern industrialism passed beyond its adolescent phase. In both countries the prevailing social order for the great mass of people was still pre-machine and pre-industrial. In both countries the acids of modernity had not yet eaten deeply into the religious disposition of the people. In both countries the natural pattern of all government was still the primitive pattern of the hierarchy with an absolute sovereign at the top. The bolshevik dictatorship and the fascist dictatorship, underneath all their modernist labels and theories, are feudal military organizations attempting to subdue and administer the machine technology. The theorists of the two dictatorships are, however, men educated under modern influences, and the result is that their theories are an attempt to explain the primitive behavior of the two dictatorships in terms which are consistent with modern ideas. The formula reached in both instances is the same one. The dictatorships are said to be temporary. Their purpose, we are told, is to put the [p252] new social order into effect, and to keep it going long enough by dictation from on top to give time for a new generation to grow up which will be purged of those vices which would make the new order unworkable. The bolshevists and fascists regard themselves as ever so much more realistic than the old democratic socialists and the _laissez-faire_ liberals whom they have executed, exiled, or dosed with castor oil. In an important sense they are more realistic. They have recognized that a substitute for primitive capitalism cannot be inaugurated or administered by a generation which has been schooled in the ways of primitive capitalism. And therefore the oligarchy of dictators, as a conscious, enlightened, superior, and heavily armed minority, propose to administer the industrial machine as trustees until there is a generation ready to accept the responsibilities.