JUVENILE REDS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19163, 21 November 1927, Page 12

JUVENILE REDS.

CHILDREN'S DELEGATION TO RUSSIA. GLAD TIDINGS FOB COMMUNISTS (7BOM OCX OWJT COBBBSPOWDSNT.) LONDON, October 4. The "Children's Delegation to Soviet Russia," which left England on June 21st to inspect the condition of children in the Soviet Union, received its official welcome home at the hands of the Communist Party of Great Britain at a meeting held at the Town Hall, Bethnal Green. The audience found it impossible to restrain its admiration (says the special correspondent of the "Morning Post"), as speaker followed speaker in a catalogue of the joys of Bolshevism, the schools where the children only did the work that pleased them, the summer camps, the gorgeous mansions overlooking the Black Sea, and inhabited solely by "workers," the centres for free food or free clothing, and the rest homes for the unemployed —gilding the lily with a vengeance this last. Our sympathy was the more poignant when W6 heard that in almost every case the delegation had arrived just "too late (or just too early) to see the particular miracle in the performance. But we could rejoice that they were told of them, and that they were able to pass on to us the glad tidings. Bondage of Capital. Here was an audience of several hundred adult beings, gifted by nature with intellect, and armed with the franchise, listening in solemn silence, punctuated only by applause which was obviously sincere, to the artificial and ponderous platitudes of academic Communism ; learned off by heart, and delivered by, children. It is difficult to imagine what would be the state of mind of the average "bourgeois" parent, if his twelve-year-old son were to address him in these words: "Father, it is my bounden duty to give you a report on Soviet Russia. I have determined to fight to the last drop of my blood to be free of the bondage of capital. Arid in future, I would be grateful if you would have me instructed in physics rather than, religion, for I have long since ceased to believe in God and all that sort of stuff." But last night's audience seemed overcome by its admiration. One speaker repeated with evident emo- j tion, that age-long delusion, "If we have made a mess of things, the kids are going to put it right." Soviet School Life. The children, it must be confessed, were by no means deficient in the arts i of the orator. One boy in particular had every trick of emphasis, of gesture, of intonation, tricks which betrayed the trained, not the born, rhetorician. Comrade Nancy Hall, the only girl in the delegation, was greatly taken with the life of the school child in Russia. "They do not take their lessons, as their teachers want them," she said. "If they're not feeling like doing geography one day, why, they don't do it. You know very well that your own children aren't treated like that. In Russia a teacher is content to know one subject thoroughly; she does not pretend to know every subject like they do in England." Comrade Clifford Roberts, from th» Rhondda Valley, liked the Russian system of history. "They are taught working-class history there," he said. "Here you get boss-history, about kings who have been dead years." Comrade Norman Paton, aged twelve, gravely delivered himself as follows: "Revolution is the.only hope in this world, and with this Govern-. ment." These young comrades all wore scarlet neck-cloths and Lenin brooches.