y run at all the risk of corruption of the
post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists? Why first
admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and
effort in preventing them from coming to the top? Therefore, they
declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than
a government by the representative organ of the workers--the Soviets.

If we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and
fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the
doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they
practice, then the American end of the problem, too, appears in a new
light. No longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or
against the desirability of a Bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the
proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and
probable behavior of the classes in a given society. It is as futile to
"see red" in America because of Bolshevism in Russia as to yearn for
Bolshevism's advent in the United States. Either view misses the
all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned America
is the antipodes of Russia, where the capitalists have shown little
fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening
to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego
their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the
industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight.
Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some
imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor
dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." No one who knows the
American business class will even dream that it would under any
circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or
that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities.
A Bolshevist _coup d'etat_ in America would mean a civil war to the
bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join
the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private
property.[110]

But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the
United States is so decisively with private property that America is
proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one. Another and
perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her
four million organized trade unionists. For, however u