It was this speech which lighted the torch of the Red Terror as a back-fire against the White Terror, already so far under way that the very life of the revolution was at stake. But it is well for Trotsky and for the revolution that Trotsky did not direct this terror; he was too passionate and too thorough a soul to have been entrusted with such a conflagration. Trotsky is not a diplomat. He was not successful as Foreign Minister. Diplomacy is too cut and dried to be harmonious with his talents. To be a good diplomat one must be contained and calculating and unemotional, content with the material on hand; one cannot be an originator. Trotsky is essentially an originator. It was not his destiny to accept the ready-made. It was his destiny to tear Russia out of old ruts and send her bleeding but inspired down new ways; it was his destiny to make war on Russian inertia, which is the curse of Russia and the whole East. In Trotsky we discern something distinctly elemental. He looks like a fighter, with his burning eyes and sharp decisive way of speaking, his gestures, his quick regular gait. When he is calm he does not appear to be himself. But even in ordinary conversation he bestirs himself, he throws himself headlong into every discussion, and the listener is so carried away that he remembers it all afterward with astonishment. The storm Trotsky started in Russia, while it did not rage without wreckage, at least had the effect of waking up a nation out of its medieval slumber. Wherever he goes he stirs people, either individually or collectively. No one is neutral about him, Trotsky is either loved or despised. In the Red Army, he has all the energetic young men of the nation assembled and under his influence. He has charge of their education. The majority have learned to read and write in his army schools. The way they express it is that he has given them “new eyes.” Trotsky is the idol of the Red Army. His amazing physical vigor combined with a very un-Russian orderliness, his personal bravery and reckless defiance of custom, make their former leaders appear dull and backward. He creates in his pupils a deep dissatisfaction for all that is old and outworn. These young men come from the villages, from every province in Russia. When they go back home they look at the village with disapproval, they want to change everything. In a little while, because of their superior knowledge they become men of importance, leading their local Soviets and attending the Congresses in Moscow. If Trotsky can not understand the little ridiculous points of diplomatic etiquette, the cunning and sensitiveness which mark a good diplomat, he thoroughly comprehends how to take advantage of every modern appliance and every modern method of running the War Office. No War Office under any Tsar could boast such order as Trotsky’s. Everything goes like clock-work, you are aware of energy and efficiency; it has the hum of a high-power engine.