leading to a minority dictatorship is one peculiarly calculated to create habits of despotism which would survive the crisis by which they were generated.  Communist politicians are likely to become just like the politicians of other parties:  a few will be honest, but the great majority will merely cultivate the art of telling a plausible tale with a view to tricking the people into entrusting them with power.  The only possible way by which politicians as a class can be improved is the political and psychological education of the people, so that they may learn to detect a humbug.  In England men have reached the point of suspecting a good speaker, but if a man speaks badly they think he must be honest.  Unfortunately, virtue is not so widely diffused as this theory would imply.

In the second place, it is assumed by the Communist argument that, although capitalist propaganda can prevent the majority from becoming Communists, yet capitalist laws and police forces cannot prevent the Communists, while still a minority, from acquiring a supremacy of military power.  It is thought that secret propaganda can undermine the army and navy, although it is admittedly impossible to get the majority to vote at elections for the programme of the Bolsheviks.  This view is based upon Russian experience, where the army and navy had suffered defeat and had been brutally ill used by incompetent Tsarist authorities.  The argument has no application to more efficient and successful States.  Among the Germans, even in defeat, it was the civilian population that began the revolution.

There is a further assumption in the Bolshevik argument which seems to me quite unwarrantable.  It is assumed that the capitalist governments will have learned nothing from the experience of Russia.  Before the Russian Revolution, governments had not studied Bolshevik theory.  And defeat in war created a revolutionary mood throughout Central and Eastern Europe.  But now the holders of power are on their guard.  There seems no reason whatever to suppose that they will supinely permit a preponderance of armed force to pass into the hands of those who wish to overthrow them, while, according to the Bolshevik theory, they are still sufficiently popular to be supported by a majority at the polls.  Is it not as clear as noonday that in a democratic country it is more difficult for the proletariat to destroy the Government by arms than to defeat it in a general election?  Seeing the immense advantages of a Government in dealing with rebels, it seems clear that rebellion could have little hope of success unless a very large majority supported it.  Of course, if the army and navy were specially revolutionary, they might effect an unpopular revolution; but this situation, though something like it occurred in Russia, is hardly to be expected in the Western nations.  This whole Bolshevik theory of revolution by a minority is one which might just conceivably have succeeded as a secret plot, but becomes impossible as soon as it is openly avowed and advocated.