e are not sure of that; the world is not sure.
Let us Russians pay the price of the experiment;
do the hard, hard work of it; make the
sacrifice--then your people can follow us, slowly,
as they decide for themselves that what we have is
worth having."

That is the message you bring back, Mr. Bullitt. It is your
duty to deliver it. It is mine to enforce it by my
conception of the situation as it stands in Russia and
Europe to-day.

It seems to me that we are on the verge of war, a new war, a
terrible war--the long-predicted class war--all over Europe.

The peace commission, busy with the settlement of the old
war, may not see the new one, or may not measure aright the
imminent danger of it. Germany is going over, Hungary has
gone, Austria is coming into the economic revolutionary
stage. The propaganda for it is old and strong in all
countries: Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway,
Sweden--you know. All men know this propaganda. But that is
in the rear. Look at the front.

Russia is the center of it. Germany, Austria, Hungary are
the wings of the potential war front of--Bolshevism.

And Russia, the center, has made a proposition to you for
peace, for a separate peace; made it officially; made it
after thought; made it proudly, not in fear, but in pitiful
sympathy with its suffering people and for the sake of a
vision of the future in which it verily believes. They are
practical men--those that made it. You met them. We talked
with them. We measured their power. They are all idealists,
but they are idealists sobered by the responsibility of
power. Sentiment has passed out of them into work--hard
work. They said they could give one year more of starvation
to the revolution, but they said it practically, and they
prefer to compromise and make peace. I believe that, if we
take their offer, there will be such an outcry of rage and
disappointment from the Left Socialists of Germany, Italy,
France, and the world, that Lenin and Trotsky will be
astonished. The Red Revolution--the class war--will be
broken, and evolution will have its chance once more in the
rest of Europe. And you and I know that the men we met in
Moscow see this thus, and that they believe the peace
conference will not, can no