Further it will have to
continue over a sufficiently long period of time to allow of the risk
of its becoming stable and traditional. In adult education already the
pupil comes for a short period, learns Communism, reading and
writing--there is hardly time to give him much more--and returns to
leaven the army or his native village. In achieving this the
Bolsheviks are already doing a very important and valuable work, but
they cannot hope for a long while to become the model of public
instruction which they have hitherto been represented to be. And the
conditions of their becoming so ultimately are adherence to their
ideals through a very long period of stress, and a lessening of
fanaticism in their Communist teaching, conditions which, unhappily,
seem to be mutually incompatible.
The whole of the argument set out in this chapter may be summed up in
the statement of one fact which the mere idealist is prone to
overlook, namely that Russia is a country at a stage in economic
development not much more advanced than America in the pioneer days.
The old civilization was aristocratic and exotic; it could not survive
in the modern world. It is true that it produced great men, but its
foundations were rotten. The new civilization may, for the moment, be
less productive of individual works of genius, but it has a new
solidity and gives promise of a new unity. It may be that I have taken
too hopeful a view and that the future evolution of Russia will have
as little connection with the life and tradition of its present
population as modern America with the life of the Red Indian tribes.
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