The killing and blockading are not the important facts. Whatever may be behind the Russian business, the most disturbing portent is the fact which no one challenges and which indeed is most generally offered as a sort of defence. It is this: Nobody knows what the policy of the Government in Russia is, or was. It is commonly said they had no policy. Certainly it was changeable. That means that the Government does not need to give an explanation in order to start upon a war which may affect the whole future form of Western society. They did not have to explain because nobody particularly cared. Commands for youths to die in wars of unknown purpose do not strike us as monstrous when the commands are given by our own Governments--Governments which notoriously we do not trouble to control. Public opinion as a whole did not have any intense feeling about the Russian war, and not the slightest as to whether we used poison gas, or bombarded Russian cathedrals, or killed Russian civilians. We did not want it to be expensive, and Mr Churchill promised that if it cost too much he would drop it. He admitted finally that it was unnecessary by dropping it. But it was not important enough for him to resign over. And as for bringing anybody to trial for it, or upsetting the monarchy....[62] There is another aspect of our feeling about the Prussian tendencies and temper, to rid the world of which we waged the War. All America (or Britain, for that matter: America is only a striking and so a convenient example) knew that the Bismarckian persecution of the Socialists, the imprisonment of Bebel, of Liebknecht, the prosecution of newspapers for anti-militarist doctrines, the rigid control of education, by the Government, were just the natural prelude to what ended in Louvain and Aerschot, to the shooting down of the civilians of an invaded country. Again, that was why Prussia had to be destroyed in the interest of human freedom and the safety of democracy. The newspapers, the professors, the churches, were telling us all this endlessly for five years. Within a year of the end of the War, America is engaged in an anti-Socialist campaign more sweeping, more ruthless, by any test which you care to apply--the numbers arrested, the severity of the sentences imposed, the nature of the offences alleged--than anything ever attempted by Bismarck or the Kaiser. Old men of seventy (one selected by the Socialist party as Presidential Candidate), young girls, college students, are sent to prison with sentences of ten, fifteen, or twenty years. The elected members of State Legislatures are not allowed to sit, on the ground of their Socialist opinions. There are deportations in whole shiploads. If one takes the Espionage Act and compares it with any equivalent German legislation (the tests applied to school teachers or the refusal of mailing privileges to Socialist papers), one finds that the general principle of control of political