First of all, Communism is revolution, a rupture of order, a break in the evolution of Western civilization. Democracy, on the other hand, is a way of conducting affairs so that there is some kind of harmonious continuity in the direction of society. There may be errors and blunders, and there are certainly lags, but the people in a democracy are themselves so sensitive that they automatically exert a corrective force in the way a ship’s gyroscope does. This sensitiveness is the strength of democracy. Communism must operate within a relatively simple but rigid structure (like the “classless society”) with a narrow philosophic base and narrowly defined aims, so that the prestige of authority can be enhanced to tyrannical proportions and so that the decrees of authority can be immediately and continuously checked. There is no margin either for error or disagreement. Democracy is a complex way of life, lacking the utter concentration of energy in any one direction (save in time of national emergency) that marks Communism and that makes no allowance for opposing points of view. Communism must drastically curtail man’s freedom in the first place, prescribe his rights and privileges in the second, and finally it must stand constantly ready to alienate those rights—by force, if necessary, or by the show of force, or by the implication of force. Democracy seeks a constant enlargement of man’s freedom. Because in modern times Communism has seemed able to establish itself only by violence, it seems reasonable to assume that violence is necessary to its perpetuation, while at the same time it is more susceptible to disintegration through violence. Under Communism, man is the slave of the state. Under democracy, the state is the servant of man. If all this editorializing sounds somewhat beside the point, since only peripherally does it have to do with my Negroness, then I can only plead that it seems to me a description of the sober facts, and that it is by way of being an explanation to the Communists of my anti-Communism. I should have given it to them ten years ago. They should have had it back in 1942 when, after a ten-year layoff, the Communists came at me again and made it necessary for me to try to achieve a certain degree of clarity about these issues.