go to work.

The shock of this, and the confusion due to the strange
details of it, were, and they still are, painful to many
minds, and not only to the rich. For a long time there was
widespread discontent with this new system. The peasants
rebelled, and the workers were suspicious. They blamed the
new system for the food shortage, the fuel shortage, the
lack of raw materials for the factories. But this also was
anticipated by that very remarkable mind and will--Lenin. He
used the State monopoly and control of the press, and the
old army of revolutionary propagandists to shift the blame
for the sufferings of Russia from the revolutionary
government to the war, the blockade, and the lack of
transportation. Also, he and his executive organization were
careful to see that, when the government did get hold of a
supply of anything, its arrival was heralded, and the next
day it appeared at the community shops, where everybody
(that worked) got his share at the low government price. The
two American prisoners we saw had noticed this, you
remember. "We don't get much to eat," they said, "but
neither do our guards or the other Russians. We all get the
same. And when they get more, we get our share."

The fairness of the new system, as it works so far, has won
over to it the working class and the poorer peasants. The
well-to-do still complain, and very bitterly sometimes.
Their hoardings are broken into by the government and by the
poverty committees, and they are severely punished for
speculative trading. But even these classes are moved
somewhat by the treatment of children. They are in a class
by themselves: class A,--I. They get all the few
delicacies--milk, eggs, fruit, game, that come to the
government monopoly--at school, where they all are fed,
regardless of class. "Even the rich children," they told us,
"they have as much as the poor children." And the children,
like the workers, now see the operas, too, the plays, the
ballets, the art galleries--all with instructors.

The Bolsheviks--all the Russian parties--regard the
communists' attitude toward children as the symbol of their
new civilization.

"It is to be for the good of humanity, not business," one of
them, an American, said, "and the kids represent the future