September 27, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
to deal with, nor a clear national ideal supporting it. 
Its direction is in the hands of men whose ideals are essentially 
cosmopolitan, many of whom are not Russians at all, but have 
in the past proved their detestation of the Russian character 
and regarded themselves as the victims of that character. The 
material with whicli it deals is not one nation at all. The 
Russian Empire which it has overset was not one organised 
people, but an autocracy which united under its control 
elements the most diverse in speech, origin, social tradition and 
religion.^ The Finns are not Russians at all. South Russia has 
elements which we cannot judge in the west, but which are 
certainly separatist. The Cossacks are an element apart. 
The Poles were a distinct and separate entity, and the outlying 
territories to the south and to the east in the Caucasus and 
beyond, and in Asia, were no part at all of one united nation. 
The Jewish element, very powerful, very numerous, and| in 
the main German-speaking, were something utterly distinct 
from, and usually hostile to those whom they now largely 
inspire and claim to order. . 
One Heart, One Brain 
f\gain. France had in the revolution one heart and brain 
for its whole organism, which was Paris. Russia has no such 
centre. The town which claiijis to govern is the least national 
of all Russian towns. Paris is the most national of all the 
French towns. Some sort of parallel might be afforded by Moscow 
if Moscow had been the seat of the movement and the traditions 
of Moscow and the local nativcleaders of Moscow its inspiration. 
Petrograd can lay no such claim. On the contrary, its 
f)osition is the very antithesis morally, geographically and 
politically, of a national capital. It is an extreme frontier town, 
gathering within it and intensifying every anti-national mood 
and itself the artificial creation — and the recent creation — of 
bureaucracy. 
Again, the French Revolution set out with a definite object 
with a creed and documents supporting that claim. Its 
whole action was positive. You hate it or you love it, as you 
hate or you love an organistd religion. In the Russian move- 
ment there is nothing of this. There is a chaos of conflicting 
negations. There is nothing upon which you can put your finger 
and say, " This is that clear doctrine for which these men 
have risen and for which they are willing to die." 
But undoubtedly the sharpest contrast of all, and cer- 
tainly the one which most practically concerns ourselves, is 
the military contrast, and here you have a contrast of north 
against south, of plus against minus. 
The French Revolution was launched before the outbreak of 
war. The war which followed upon it was a war, the flaming 
motive of which was military success. The appeal was 
made to a military nation to resist an invader who had in- 
solently proposed to dictate domestic policy. The whole 
revolution naturally turned into a war of propaganda and of 
conquest, and the very nature of the whole thing was bound 
to, become military from the moment that, in Dan ton's prophecy, 
"the first bugles should sound." 
The Russian Revolution broke out as a consequence of defeat. 
Its extremists were the opponents of war, and particularly 
of a war of national defence. It was bred in the distaste 
of, or the hatred for, tiie profession of arms, its intensity was 
marked progressively by the denunciation of the military spirit. 
In France the cJiief architect of the revolution wasCarnot, 
a professional soldier whose interest, let alone whose stoical 
ideals, were those of a soldier. Read the movements of the 
man Ixifore W attignics, and see how the mere intellectual in- 
terest of tactics absorbed him. Note how the songs and the 
legends of the French Ri^voiution are the songs and the legends 
of arms ; ^nd mark the passion for military order which pre- 
cisely coincides with the most violent strain of 1794. 
The Reign of Terror was essentially martial law. And 
if you consult the motives of its cruelty, and read in detail 
the indictments under which its victims suffered, you will 
find the overwhelming mass of them to be indictments against 
military treason or military slackness. Even apart fron\ 
this military character of the Gallic race and of its chief 
modern effort you have the clear reasoning, the intellectual 
power which grasped from the earliest moment of the effort 
what should be for all of us to-day its chief lesson : that a 
political ideal once challenged to battle by an opponent can 
only be realised by decisive victory in the field. 
The Russian Revolution does not show this character 
but its exact opposite. Its extremists are men who cry for 
p<!ace, who tell us that the punishment of aggression is im- 
moral, and who believe or say that an undefeated enemy who 
hais already half crushed tiie army organisation will, if he is 
now propitiated, leave them for the future in peace. 
The characteristic phrase of the French Revolution, 
rhetorical and borrowed from antiquity was this : " The 
Rf-public does not negotiate with an enemy upon the national 
soil." Of such a characteristic phrase the Russian Revolu- 
tion gives us no echo. There is no defining principle capable 
of producing such an historical sentence. The nearest thing 
to it is the reproduction of a false and silly sentence, framed 
in Berlin, " No annexations and no indemnities." In other 
words, no victory. 
It is a phrase not only of German origin, but accurately 
repeated for the most part by men whi)se own language 
in Petrograd is German. It is as though when Verdun 
had fallen in 1792 Dan ton had said.: " No act of wicked 
violence against our friends the Emigres and Brunswick." 
What he did say (and all France echoed him^ was something 
very different. He said : " What we need is Daring and 
more Daring and ceaseless Daring." We have had no such 
signal from the east to-day, and we may wait long for it. 
A less general examination will show another characteristic 
difference between the two movements, which is, after all, 
but the natural consequence of their profound spiritual 
diversity. 
The French movement was wholly directed by men who 
were the very concentration of the F'rench people ; their 
essence as it were : that professional middle-class of the 
eighteenth century which has been reproached for the spirit 
of the Jacobins, whose limited views upon liberty and property 
have been the jest of their opponents, whose culture has been 
thought too narrow — but who changed the world. 
Every one of the leading men in the French Revolution 
is the man trained in the traditions of the French University 
and in the spirit of the French bourgeoisie. It was the. 
lawyers, the officers of the learned arms, sappers and gunners, 
the young poets and the young scholars, the local magnates 
of the towns, who made the thing, who directed it, and who 
conquered Europe. The modern l-^uropean society which 
they erected has been made in their image, it has failed where 
they lacked breadth and magnificence, it has succeeded 
where the strong virtues of their class were needed. They 
were the spokesmen and the captains of the whole affair. 
Napoleon himself was of them. Rousseau had been of them. 
Robespierre, Carnot, St. Just. Danton, the mad Marat— every 
name you can choose was of them. 
There is nothing corresponding to this at all in the Russian 
movement. Whether such a class exists in Russia may be 
doubted. That it has come to control the revolution, if it 
does exist, can certainly be denied. 
Now it is unfortunately probable that without some such 
homogeneous class direction a movement of this kind can 
neither progress nor succeed. 
Lastly, you have the simple truth that the nation of France 
at the French Revolution, through the volunteers and through 
the less articulate action of the peasants, joined the general 
scheme. It was fairly articulate, it was upon the whole 
united, it went forward towards a common end, and that end 
you may see around you in Western Europe to-day. But 
of what the mass of the Russian peasantry may think or wish 
to do to-dav we hear nothing. The revolution in France took 
arms and conquered after the national federation. Of such 
national federation, nay, of so much as a national convention, 
we have heard nothing in Russia but promises— though six 
months have passed. We simply do not know what the 
nation, that interior Russian mass lying centrally among so 
many other different peoples, the Muscovy peasantry which 
is properly described as Russian, thinks or feels upon the 
whole affair. It has not spoken, and as yet no steps have 
been taken by which it may be permitted to speak. 
H. Belloc. 
It is too often rpgarded in this country that inasmuch as 
Germany has introduced the ration ticket system, everything 
works smoothly in tliat country under the Food Controller. 
But this extract froin the Vossisclie Xeilimf; of Berlin which 
appeared only last week, pives a very different view : 
•' Everyone in Berlin buys on the sly what he can — noble, 
)io.st-office official, shopfiirl, merchant, workman, and officer. 
The usually moral man sees and hears with remarkable 
light-mindedness the humorous tales regarding the persistent 
manner in which all classes ignore the law— as, for example, the 
wild prices which workmen, tlicmsclves receiving the wildest 
wages, pav in Spandau for illegally imported food, etc. Even 
if one we're to let loose that dangerous expedient—general 
information against evcryf)ne — where can we find the prisons to 
hold the millions who will be convicted ? Under such circum- 
stances someone will always ask if it is not better to do away with 
this entire system of penality and compulsion, which is directed, 
not against the minority, but against the majority. A return 
to free trading without conditions or limitations has been many 
times demanded. That is impo.ssible. The simplest expedient 
of going .back to the peace basis when the industrial situation is 
so thoroughly abnormal wf)uld have the most dangerous conse- 
quences. Whether a vital change in our war industrial organisa- 
tion is cither possible or advisable in the present state of high 
war tension is a question which can only be decided by a con- 
ference of experts. It must also be rcme'nibcred that when i^ace 
negotiations or an armistice begin it will be impossible to change 
matters even then." 
