but they discarded military
intervention on grounds of their own internal policy, and because it ran
counter to the principle of self-determination. Over against that
principle, however, one had to set the circumstance that they were
already intermeddling in Russian affairs in Archangel, Murmansk,
Odessa, and elsewhere, and that they ended by creating a new state and
government in northwestern Russia, against which Kolchak and Denikin
vehemently protested.

In mitigation of judgment it is only fair to take into account the
tremendous difficulties that faced them; their unfamiliarity with the
Russian problem; the want of a touchstone by which to test the
overwhelming mass of conflicting information which poured in upon them;
their constitutional lack of moral courage, and the circumstance that
they were striving to reconcile contradictories. Without chart or
compass they drifted into strange and sterile courses, beginning with
the Prinkipo incident and ending with the written examination to which
they naively subjected Kolchak in order to legalize international
relations, which could not truly be described as either war or peace.
Neither the causes of Bolshevism in its morbid manifestations nor the
unformulated ideas underlying whatever positive aspect it may be
supposed to possess, nor the conditions governing its slow but
perceptible evolution, were so much as glanced at, much less studied, by
the statesmen who blithely set about dealing with it now by military
force, now by economic pressure, and fitfully by tentative forbearance
and hints to its leaders of forthcoming recognition.

One cannot thus play fast and loose with the destinies of a community
composed of one hundred and fifty million people whose members are but
slackly linked together by a few tenuous social bonds, without
forfeiting the right to offer them real guidance. And a blind man is a
poor guide to those who can see. Alone the Americans were equipped with
carefully tabulated statistics and huge masses of facts which they
poured out as lavishly as coal-heavers hurl the contents of their sacks
into the cellar. But they put them to no practical use. Losing
themselves in a labyrinth of details, they failed to get a
comprehensive view of the whole. The other delegations lacked both data
and general ideas. And all the Allies were destitute of a powerful army
in the East, and therefore of the means of asserting the authority which
they assumed.

They on