Speeches were made by Russians and British alternately. At the Moscow meeting a Menshevik was permitted to speak, and made a plucky performance under very trying circumstances. The Russian official speeches were all of one quality and directed towards very definite ideas. These speeches soon became so familiar that we learnt to anticipate the phrases. When a little boy of ten was brought forward at one of the schools to repeat to us his Communist lesson, we recognised the words of the father on the lips of the child. There was the same talk of the dictatorship of the working masses, the same passionate appeal to the British workers to drop their old method and march into the streets and to the barricades, the same prophecies of a world-revolution, the same sneers at those who hope to achieve their object by peaceful and democratic means, the same wearisome exclamatory phrases at the end. “Long live the Soviet Republic!” “Long live the Workers Revolution!” “Long live the international solidarity of Labour!” Admirable phrases were some of these, but incongruous in the mouth of a pale little fellow of ten, undersized on his cabbage soup and black bread; and unspeakably funny tripping from the unaccustomed lips of sober-speeched Britons, anxious not to be outdone in the delivery of explosive perorations. “Long live Soviet Russia!” “Long live the Russian Communist Party!” “Long live the Workers Revolution!” A few phrases from the speeches of the Russian orators will illustrate the kind of message they wished to give us and will show the misunderstanding of our mission and of the state of the Labour Movement in Great Britain of which I wrote in a previous chapter. To take the following sentences from a speech delivered by Ziperovitch, of the Trades Union Council of the Province of Petrograd: “It is with a feeling of deep satisfaction that the Russian Trades Union Council notices that the mighty pressure of the British Revolutionary Movement has at last made the Government of Lloyd George give up the police methods (as the refusal of passports) so degrading to the British proletariat.” Was it, I wonder, the “mighty pressure of the British Revolutionary Movement” which accomplished this? Or was it due to the Prime Minister’s desire to begin the movement for happier relations with Russia? Take another phrase: “I am deeply convinced that the visit of our British comrades is a promising symbol of the great moral upheaval in that country.”