jealousies and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations; also to the power of Bolshevik propaganda.  He said the Germans had laughed when the Bolsheviks proposed to combat guns with leaflets, but that the event had proved the leaflets quite as powerful.  I do not think he recognizes that the Labour and Socialist parties have had any part in the matter.  He does not seem to know that the attitude of British Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity.

He thoroughly enjoys the attacks of Lord Northcliffe, to whom he wishes to send a medal for Bolshevik propaganda.  Accusations of spoliation, he remarked, may shock the bourgeois, but have an opposite effect upon the proletarian.

I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox.  His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith—­religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr’s hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical.  He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power.  Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills.  If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world.  I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Trotsky, whom the Communists do not by any means regard as Lenin’s equal, made more impression upon me from the point of view of intelligence and personality, though not of character.  I saw too little of him, however, to have more than a very superficial impression.  He has bright eyes, military bearing, lightning intelligence and magnetic personality.  He is very good-looking, with admirable wavy hair; one feels he would be irresistible to women.  I felt in him a vein of gay good humour, so long as he was not crossed in any way.  I thought, perhaps wrongly, that his vanity was even greater than his love of power—­the sort of vanity that one associates with an artist or actor.  The comparison with Napoleon was forced upon one.  But I had no means of estimating the strength of his Communist conviction, which may be very sincere and profound.