RIDING A TIGER.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXII, Issue 4310, 29 August 1921, Page 4

RIDING A TIGER.

— Captain McCullagh, formerly a member of the British Military Mis-

sion at Omsk, theri 5 a priso mr of the Bolsheviks, and finally in disguise as a journalist at Moscow, set down, what he saw without concealment or partiality in his book, “A Prisoner of the Reds.” Discussing this, Dean Inge says: ‘‘Everywhere the slogan is seen and heard : ‘Workers of the world, unite ! You have the world ‘o gain, and only your chains to Ipse !’ Agents who have done their foul work in Russia are eager to preach violence and revolution abroad. Their frenzied minds can be soothed only j by destroying civilisation everywhere. Lenin, cut off like a leper from all the ’ Governments of the world, ‘is in daily communication with the most I desperate and dangerous section of | every people, and’the best passport to his presence-chamber is the brand of Cain.’ Yet he has failed ; he has done the opposite to what he intended.

He set out to kill militarism ; he is now the only militarist in Europe. He has made the Russian people bellicose, for the first time in their history, He has killed the Socialistic spirit, formerly so strong in all Russians, and substituted for it a harsh, greedy individualism. He set out to destroy capitalism, and he is- fatting into the hands of the foreign conces-sion-hunters, who Captain McCullagh found swarming in Moscow, men who took their lives in their hands in coming to Russia, and expect ,to make: fortunes larger than those of Rand millionaires. He proclaimed that he would abolish corruption: it waS never so rife as it is now. Lastly, he knows that both the peasants the working men are aaginst him.. He has confessed that though, there are nominally 600,000 Communists im Russia, thejre are not 5000 who can be trusted thoroughly. The-Bolshe-viks, while gloating over the panic which thejy inspire, know that they are unequally matched against all the wealth, the wisdom, and the craft, of the old world ; and they are be-

ginning to eralise that they have a ' more invincible enemy .than att these

( —human nature itself.. Yet Lenin j and Trotsky cannot go back; they L. must fulfil their destiny to the end. For, as a Chinese proverb says, ‘H'c yho rides on a tiger can. never dismount.’ ”