He wanted more of my Russian impressions. I told him that I thought that in many directions, and more particularly in the Petersburg Commune, Communism was pressing too hard and too fast, and destroying before it was ready to rebuild. They had broken down trading before they were ready to ration; the co-operative organisation had been smashed up instead of being utilised, and so on. That brought us to our essential difference, the difference of the Collectivist and Marxist, the question whether the social revolution is, in its extremity, necessary, whether it is necessary to overthrow one social and economic system completely before the new one can begin. I believe that through a vast sustained educational campaign the existing Capitalist system could be _civilised_ into a Collectivist world system; Lenin on the other hand tied himself years ago to the Marxist dogmas of the inevitable class war, the downfall of Capitalist order as a prelude to reconstruction, the proletarian dictatorship, and so forth. He had to argue, therefore, that modern Capitalism is incurably predatory, wasteful, and unteachable, and that until it is destroyed it will continue to exploit the human heritage stupidly and aimlessly, that it will fight against and prevent any administration of national resources for the general good, and that it will inevitably make wars. I had, I will confess, a very uphill argument. He suddenly produced Chiozza Money’s new book, _The Triumph of Nationalisation_, which he had evidently been reading very carefully. “But you see directly you begin to have a good working collectivist organisation of any public interest, the Capitalists smash it up again. They smashed your national shipyards; they won’t let you work your coal economically.” He tapped the book. “It is all here.” And against my argument that wars sprang from nationalist imperialism and not from a Capitalist organisation of society he suddenly brought: “But what do you think of this new Republican Imperialism that comes to us from America?” Here Mr. Rothstein intervened in Russian with an objection that Lenin swept aside. And regardless of Mr. Rothstein’s plea for diplomatic reserve, Lenin proceeded to explain the projects with which one American at least was seeking to dazzle the imagination of Moscow. There was to be economic assistance for Russia and recognition of the Bolshevik Government. There was to be a defensive alliance against Japanese aggression in Siberia. There was to be an American naval station on the coast of Asia, and leases for long terms of sixty or fifty years of the natural resources of Khamchatka and possibly of other large regions of Russian Asia. Well, did I think that made for peace? Was it anything more than the beginning of a new world scramble? How would the British Imperialists like this sort of thing? [Illustration: