quiet hours thoughts are born to them -embryo thoughts that perish when any sound or sight brings back their easy servitude again. For here, tonight, I am in common case with them as they stand uneasily in their stalls; and I, threading my path, now this path, now that, till surely one has threaded them all, find even as a horse must find

'I have bumped this corner of the manger, I have run my nose along it, I have bumped that. I have stretched up till the rope checked, I have stretched down, I have nuzzled that lump of salt wherever it will go. I have stamped with this hoof and that; first, one, two, three, four; now, three two, one, four; then, four, two, three, one; now, one, three, four, two; and so on and on!'

Just so, I pacing my round, counting my steps, lulled by rhythm and by number which is rhythm, fall into some such automatism, out of which (for me certainly) a thought will be born. As now. My mind says Barren Figtree; and then Baron Figtree. (This is from a book of a hundred riddles that I had as a small child:) 'What English nobleman is mentioned in the Bible? Baron Figtree.' Or did they spell it 'Barren.' This unaccountable mental motor within me plays elaborately with delicacies of pronunciation for purposes of a pun. Barron or Baren? Barron Figtree; Baren Figtree. The thing obsesses me for a whole round of stable A. If I don't shake it off I'll be asleep. I stand and stamp the ground and work my neck, stretch it and strain it even as the horses do, that being the recognized safeguard.

At this point of mentality then I am on quite common ground, I do believe, with my stable companions, restless and rhythmic near me. For me, with reasonable human arrogance be it said, it is a descent. This is not true thought,

if by thought we mean idea bridged more or less creatively to idea. For them it is the present summit of selfconsciousness perhaps.

Number Forty-three there, the offwheeler, still and attentive; he is not asleep. Something quite alien to fodder, stables, harness-something from beyond all the animal experience that he has fulfilled has settled on his brain

as a fly settles. It makes no movement, no demand, but it is there, a strange, insistent, troubling thing. Presently it will fly away, and with relief he'll fall to his instinctive round again. But back and back it will come to him, and to his generations, in differing and developing forms, till a memory is created and questioning begins; and questioning brings answer, and from that grows.

To-night (this is the complement of my fancy), I, sleepy on my round, have been back to that point from which Forty-three, he and all his kind, are moving, ever moving upward in the scale of things.

And so, it being four o'clock, comes my relief. I seek the guard room; as I pass the sentry he gives me a wry grin.

There, on the little hammock beds let down, lie the 'spare parts' of this machinery of watch and challenge. But really, says the unregenerate civilian in me, one policeman would do the whole job more efficiently and with much less chatter.

The light is very dim, the air all blind with smoke; and oh, but they do reach the very extreme of ugliness as they lie there. Only the trumpeter boy redeems the group, and he still

snores.

There's anarchy in sleep. There's the damned truth of the world without false shame, false pride. Whence has had to come much regimenting, much

etiquette and law and war. For the hardness of our hearts? For the slackness of our souls and the feebleness of our minds?

To picture the true worth of our wise men, picture them asleep. The House of Commons and the House of Lords, all unreservedly asleep. The Cabinet, the Bench of Bishops, the War Office snoring. Carlyle saw them naked and it soured his mind to them forever. See them asleep and snoring, it might well dip you in despair.

I step gingerly to the spare hammock bed and lay myself down. Soon,

Reveille

as upon Forty-three, the off-wheeler, settles the obsessing image of such an idea, as, waking him, should welcomely bring sleep to me. But some too tired part of my brain perversely combats it, leaving poor me the helpless battleground till

The small trumpeter has tumbled up to help blow reveille. I tumble up at the sound, for once a welcome sound. Cap, boots, spurs, British warm, and blanket; Green's English People and my gloves, I tumble off with them and to my barrack room again.

Another day begun; of hither and thither and up and down..

The Poetry Review

BOLSHEVIKI AS CAPITALISTS

WRITING recently to the Morning Post on Russian affairs, I quoted the Bolshevik politician Chudskayeff's heretical opinion that soviet nationalization would after all prove to be only 'nonsense.' The reasons for M. Chudskayeff's view I gave with facts and figures. The Supreme Council of National Economy, which is the ultimate authority in these grave matters, is now rushing headlong into a new system, which indicates that though one cannot undo 'nonsense' already done, one may correct it. The new move is back toward capitalism, not indeed to what Lenine in an excellent speech calls the predatory side of capitalism,' but toward 'the, by us, unfortunately, neglected organizatory side.' In other words, private individuals are still to be forbidden to make profits, but the methods by which these private individuals made profits in pre-Bolshevik days are to be restored, and the profit is to be turned into the pocket of the State. And even, it seems, large private incomes are sometimes to be tolerated, for Lenine, in his New Problems of Soviet Power, admits that an expert factory director may be paid as much as 100,000 rubles a year.

'State capitalism,' the form which was emphatically rejected by the majority of the recently-dispersed German Socialization Commission, is Bolshevism's latest expedient. It means the exploitation of workmen to an extent to which they were not exploited by the least merciful private capitalists in modern times. Further, it is directly contrary to the Syndicalist-Bolshevik

trend elsewhere in Europe. While industrial workmen in Norway are demanding the elimination from their collective wage agreements of the provision that the employer 'directs and distributes work,' the Russian Supreme Council of Economy is depriving the workmen of their supposed elementary right to 'direct and distribute work.' But necessity knows no law. The last Russian newspapers received by me contain abundant evidence that only by compromising with 'Capitalism,' by becoming plus capitaliste que les capitalistes, can the Government of People's Commissaries survive - if it can survive at all. For instance, the new half-yearly budget (January-June, 1919) shows that the estimated expenditure is 49,100,000,000 rubles, as compared with 17,602,727,444 rubles for the corresponding half of 1918.

And there are other facts. The official Ekonomitcheskaya Zhizn states that in some cities the population is so badly off for metal goods that they pull down wooden houses for the sake of the nails, screws, locks, the roofinglead, and the drainage pipes. Nails, says this journal, cost 700 rubles per pound; tinned kitchen utensils average 450 rubles per pound; enameled iron utensils, 600 rubles per pound; and the thin brass plates, usually about eighteen inches square, which are nailed to dwelling-room floors in front of Dutch stoves, change hands at 270-300 rubles each. The raw materials pig-iron and copper - used in the construction of a locomotive at the Putiloff works cost 170,000 rubles. But, according to M. Hessen, formerly editor of the Riech, the one locomotive started on since Bolshevism seized

power is not yet finished. There is plenty more material as to the complete collapse of nationalized industry. And it is the same with nationalized trade. The Bolshevik Commissary, Molotoff, complained to the party conference at Petrograd that of the state stores in Petrograd 380 are closed and sealed.

The cause everywhere is idleness, or, as it is politely expressed, 'fall-off in per capita production.' This is the motive which has induced Lenine, backed, it seems here, by Trotzky, Chicherin, and Lunacharsky, to resort to capitalistic methods. The move has gone so far that the less compromising Bolsheviki Kameneff, Zinovieff, and, it seems, the Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution - have begun to regard Lenine and his friends as themselves 'counter-revolutionaries.' When Lenine in January restored freedom of trade except in bread, salt, sugar, and vegetable fats, the ultraCommunist newspapers of Petrograd openly attacked him as a traitor to the Bolshevik cause. And there is the same tendency now. It began when Lenine in the pamphlet mentioned demanded severe factory discipline, the subordination of employees to expert managers and technicians, piece-work, payment by results, and even the "Taylor System,' which the enslaved workman of backward Western Europe has managed to resist. 'Whereas until now,' said Lenine, 'the workmen have been autocratic masters of the factories and workshops, the interests of the revolution and of the workmen themselves demand the absolute submission of employees to the manager of each industrial enterprise.' And Trotzky, in a speech which I have not seen, but which is quoted in the Berlin Vorwärts, said that:

All your elected committees, even though they contain the working-class' best rep

resentatives. . . cannot replace a single technical expert with special school training... The working-class must now understand when it is necessary to submit to the expert . . . no capable and talented expert can do his work if he is made subordinate to a committee of workingmen who do not know the expert's work.

No one can accuse the Bolsheviki of lack of daring. When they decided 'Self-Government in the Factory' had failed they set about establishing the alternative, 'Autocracy in the Factory,' with unshrinking zeal. As far as one can judge from scattered references in the irregularly received Bolshevik newspapers, two systems were adopted. In some factories the detested piece-work is enforced, and in some the old system of payment by hour, day, or month is retained, combined with the new rule of a minimum output and a premium payment for output above the minimum. Workmen who fail to reach the minimum are dismissed or reduced to a lower wage scale. The minimum output and premium-payment system has been introduced into the Tula small-arms and cartridge works and into several Moscow factories, including boot and clothing works. According to the Golos Rossiyi, the innovation produced 'consternation and a sentiment of revolt.' This is natural enough, for I find in the official Ekonomitcheskaya Zhizn that idling was universal' and that the employees refused to understand that 'production is the imperative interest of the proletariat,' and, as I wrote in my last letter on Russian Nationalization, the workmen usually managed to do as they like, and even to draw pay while they were on strike. All this changed at least in certain works. It appears there were some protest strikes, but the remorseless Soviets, in the best capitalistic' tradition, put on the hunger screw, and payment by piece, and the almost equally infamous

minimum output and premium-payment system, are now in force.

And with the inevitable result. The workmen began to work-pretty badly, one may suspect, but much better than before. In Tula, according to the Labor leader Tomsky's statement to M. Puntervold, a Norwegian lawyer-Socialist who visited Moscow, there was an increase of 50 per cent in the production. M. Puntervold got other statements as to the favorable influence on output. The official Ekonomitcheskaya Zhizn records also a heavy increase of per capita productivity in metallurgical works. In some men for the first time was observed even a zeal to earn as much money as possible.' But the new discipline was strict, much stricter than the 'selflimitation on comradely initiative,' which Trotzky required. When in the Third Moscow Clothing Factory 'comradely initiative' took the form of insistence by the employees' committee on dismissal of an unpopular but efficient chief, Red Guards were marched into the factory and the workmen were marched out.

now.

Long ago the Soviets forbade strikes, calling them a form of treason against the proletariat. But all along strikes took place, and they take place even The 'capitalistic' innovation here introduced is merely that strikers are no longer paid. And the Supreme Council has dared to decree prolonged lockouts. Lately the 2,000 workmen of the nationalized Bogatyr Rubber Works defied orders and struck repeatedly because the State employer paid them only 1,000 rubles a month, whereas, their former private employers had paid them 1,500. The State employer settled the question by closing the factory down. And the State has also practically annihilated the trades unions. That is, it has absorbed them, or taken them under its protection

and tamed them, quite in the way of Plehve, Trepoff, and other stalwarts of autocracy, who by this means tried to divert working-class movements into harmless channels. The Bolshevik State has succeeded in identifying the labor unions with the State industrial control; and the humble function of the unions to-day is to increase production, and thus support the State in its struggle against the industrial worker's idleness and license. The 'Manchester Labor Union,' as the Bolshevik Kozelieff derisively calls the Western-European type of trades union borrowed by Russia after the revolution, has vanished forever. Instead, there is a paternal and wholly consistent State industrial despotism. Or rather that is the aim. The new system has been only partially carried through. But its success so far indicates that Bolshevism will persevere.

The Morning Post

GREAT BRITAIN AND THE WAR DEBT

A NATIONAL debt of about £8,000,000,000 is the governing fact of our political and economic situation at the close of the war. Few people give heed to it. Our politicians and our trade unionist leaders ignore it. Nor, indeed, is it easy for anyone to realize the meaning of a debt the interest on which is twice as large as the whole revenue of the State before the war. The public seems to accept the fact in much the same philosophic vein as the spendthrift who takes a pride in having run through a fortune. We have raised the money somehow and spent it, and only a very great country could have incurred such a debt. It is time, however, that we began to consider the matter soberly, and to adjust our national policy to our very lean national purse. Mr. Allen's little book, a