vists, but of
their adversaries, the moderate reformers. And the political strivings
of these had no organic nexus with the doctrine which emanated from the
nethermost depths in which vengeful pariahs, outlaws, and benighted
nihilists were floundering before suffocating in the ooze of anarchism.
Neither can one discern any degree of kinship between Spartacists like
Eichhorn or Lenin and moderate reformers as represented, say, by Theodor
Wolff and Boris Savinkoff. The two pairs are sundered from each other by
the distance that separates the social and the anti-social instinct.
Those are vulgar iconoclasts, these are would-be world-builders. That
the Russian, or, indeed, the German constitutional reformers should have
hugged the delusion that while thrones were being hurled to the ground,
and an epoch was passing away in violent convulsions, a few alterations
in the electoral law would restore order and bring back normal
conditions to the agonizing nations, is an instructive illustration of
the blurred vision which characterizes contemporary statesmen. The
Anglo-Saxon delegates at the Conference were under a similar delusion
when they undertook to regenerate the world by a series of merely
political changes.

No one who has followed attentively the work of the constitution-makers
in Weimar can have overlooked their readiness to adopt and assimilate
the positive elements of a movement which was essentially destructive.
In this respect they displayed a remarkable degree of open-mindedness
and receptivity. They showed themselves avid of every contribution which
they could glean from any source to the work of national reorganization,
and even in Teutonized Bolshevism they apparently found helpful hints of
timely innovations. One may safely hazard the prediction that these
adaptations, however little they may be relished, are certain to spread
to the Western peoples, who will be constrained to accept them in the
long run, and Germany may end by becoming the economic leader of
democratic Europe. The law of politico-social interchange and
assimilation underlying this phenomenon, had it been understood by the
statesmen of the Entente, might have rendered them less desirous of
seeing the German organism tainted with the germs of dissolution. For
what Germany borrows from Bolshevism to-day western Europe will borrow
from Germany to-morrow. And foremost among the new institutions which
the revolution will impose upon Europe is that