advocated by the Bolsheviks, and any one would be just as likely to
succeed as they are. What restrains these minorities, more or less, at
present, is respect for the law and the constitution. Bolsheviks
tacitly assume that every other party will preserve this respect while
they themselves, unhindered, prepare the revolution. But if their
philosophy of violence becomes popular, there is not the slightest
reason to suppose that they will be its beneficiaries. They believe
that Communism is for the good of the majority; they ought to believe
that they can persuade the majority on this question, and to have the
patience to set about the task of winning by propaganda.

The second argument of principle against the method of minority
violence is that abandonment of law, when it becomes widespread, lets
loose the wild beast, and gives a free rein to the primitive lusts and
egoisms which civilization in some degree curbs. Every student of
mediæval thought must have been struck by the extraordinarily high
value placed upon law in that period. The reason was that, in
countries infested by robber barons, law was the first requisite of
progress. We, in the modern world, take it for granted that most
people will be law-abiding, and we hardly realize what centuries of
effort have gone to making such an assumption possible. We forget how
many of the good things that we unquestionably expect would disappear
out of life if murder, rape, and robbery with violence became common.
And we forget even more how very easily this might happen. The
universal class-war foreshadowed by the Third International, following
upon the loosening of restraints produced by the late war, and
combined with a deliberate inculcation of disrespect for law and
constitutional government, might, and I believe would, produce a state
of affairs in which it would be habitual to murder men for a crust of
bread, and in which women would only be safe while armed men protected