Again I do not know how much our participation in this affair has vitiated the faith of small nations in our disinterested friendship for the weak. We may hope that the nations of South America have not taken the Russian campaign to heart as seriously as have the small nations of Europe. Whatever result our military intervention in Russia has had upon this faith, however, those of us who have been in Russia know that it has had a profound effect upon the Russian people. We have not destroyed their faith in us. One mistake could not do that. But we have disillusioned many of them concerning the soundness of our judgment if not the purity of our motives, and they will hereafter, I think, look carefully into our alliances before trusting themselves utterly to our guidance. Having got into a bad job the governments found it expedient to suppress news, to manipulate news, and even to manufacture a little. Whether we have actually prolonged Lenin’s tenure of office and Trotsky’s reign in power we cannot of course know. But this is quite conceivable, and they are still in office and in power two years after the November revolution. We know that the armed barrier that we have built around them and forced them to build in front of us has prevented us from reaching them with any of the more convincing proofs of our "friendly purpose" than the shrapnel and h.e. we have managed to get over into their lines. The business men and educators and engineers and uplifters that we were going to send have had to wait while we undertook to settle Russian turmoil by making more turmoil. We organized civil war in Russia. The Russians were not fighting the Bolsheviki—not our way. They did not want to fight them—in our way. We made them. We conscripted them to fight for their own freedom. It was difficult, but we had our army there and the army made the peasant patriotic—our way. The Russian hates conscription; but what were we to do? If he wouldn’t fight voluntarily he was a damned Bolshevik and must be made to. And so, as ever, one thing leads to another—especially when we are not quite clear that the one thing is a right thing. The conscripted Russians who rebelled against us and went over to the Bolsheviki were of course a small proportion of the whole. All sorts of mixed motives and confused judgments and conflicting loyalties entered into the situation, but one thing clearly emerged. This was civil war. Every man’s hand is set against his neighbor. And now as we confess the futility of our intervention and evacuate, the evil harvest is to be reaped. No peasant can escape it. No woman or child can escape it. Suspicion, recrimination, tale-bearing, jealousy, hatred of Russian for Russian is the harvest our intervention has left behind it. *XX* *CONCERNING RUSSIAN PEASANTS*