.
Our generation is to have only the labor, the joy, and the
misery of the struggle. We will get none of the material
benefits of the new system, and we will probably never all
understand and like it. But the children--it is for them and
their children that we are fighting, so we are giving them
the best of it from the start, and teaching them to take it
all naturally. They are getting the idea. They are to be our
new propagandists."
The idea is that everybody is to work for the common good,
and so, as the children and the American prisoners note,
when they all produce more, they all get more. They are
starving now, but they are sharing their poverty. And they
really are sharing it. Lenin eats, like everybody else--only
one meal a day--soup, fish, bread, and tea. He has to save
out of that a bit for breakfast and another bit for supper.
The people, the peasants, send him more, but he puts it in
the common mess. So the heads of this government do not have
to imagine the privations of the people; they feel them. And
so the people and the government realize that, if ever
Russia becomes prosperous, all will share in the wealth,
exactly as they share in the poverty now. In a word, rich
Russia expects to become a rich Russian people.
This, then, is the idea which has begun to catch the
imagination of the Russian people. This it is that is making
men and women work with a new interest, and a new incentive,
not to earn high wages and short hours, but to produce an
abundance for all. This is what is making a people, sick of
war, send their ablest and strongest men into the new,
high-spirited, hard-drilled army to defend, not their
borders, but their new working system of common living.
And this is what is making Lenin and his sobered communist
government ask for peace. They think they have carried a
revolution through for once to the logical conclusion. All
other revolutions have stopped when they had revolved
through the political phase to political democracy. This one
has turned once more clear through the economic phase to
economic democracy, to self-government in the factory, shop,
and on the land, and has laid a foundation for universal
profit sharing, for the universal division of food, clothes,
and all goods, equally
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