So there is nothing astonishing in the savage zeal of the men of the Convention. Their mystic mentality was the same as that of the Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The principal heroes of the Terror--Couthon, Saint Just, Robespierre, etc.--were apostles. Like Polyeuctes destroying the altars of the false gods to propagate his faith, they dreamed of converting the globe.... The mystic spirit of the leaders of the Revolution was betrayed in the least details of their public life. Robespierre, convinced that he was supported by the Almighty, assured his hearers in a speech that the Supreme Being had "decreed the Republic since the beginning of time." A recent writer, after showing that the Russian revolution has failed to put the Marxian principles into actual operation, says of Lenin and his associates: They have caught a formula of glittering words; they have learned the verbal cadences which move the masses to ecstasy; they have learned to paint a vision of heaven that shall outflare in the minds of their followers the shabby realities of a Bolshevik earth. They are master phraseocrats, and in Russia they have reared an empire on phraseocracy. The alarmists who shriek of Russia would do well to turn their thoughts from Russia's socialistic menace. The peril of Russia is not to our industries, but to our states. The menace of the Bolsheviki is not an economic one, it is a political menace. It is the menace of fanatic armies, drunken with phrases and sweeping forward under Lenin like a Muscovite scourge. It is the menace of intoxicated proletarians, goaded by invented visions to seek to conquer the world. In Nicolai Lenin the Socialist, we have naught to fear. In Nicolai Lenin the political chief of Russia's millions, we may well find a menace, for his figure looms over the world. His Bolshevik abracadabra has seduced the workers of every race. His stealthy propaganda has shattered the morale of every army in the world. His dreams are winging to Napoleonic flights, and well he may dream of destiny; for in an age when we bow to phrases, it is Lenin who is the master phraseocrat of the world. Passing over the question of Lenin's personal ambitions, and whether our own crowd-stupidity, panic, and wrong-headed Allied diplomacy may not have been contributing causes of the menace of Bolshevism, it can hardly be denied that Bolshevism, like all other revolutionary crowd-movements, is swayed by a painted vision of heaven which outflares the miseries of earth. _Every revolutionary crowd of every description is a pilgrimage set out to regain our lost Paradise._