MARRING & MEDDLING

Evening Post, Volume XCV, Issue 23, 26 January 1918, Page 10

MARRING & MEDDLING

RUSSIANS' SUPERB IGNORANCE

"An Englishman" writes as follows in the London Daily Mail: —

A traveller, returned from Petrograd, has brought back news of the superb ignorance which makes the supporters of Lenin a wonder for the wise. Some there are, deeming themselves fit for the art of Government, who believe that Lloyd George is a British Colony and thus not worth the bones of a single Bolshevik. Others with a simple ingenuity, have discovered that Annexation is a Minister of whose policy they profoundly disapprove. "We do not like Mr. Annexation," they murmur with all the pride of men to whom a great truth is revealed. After these- amazing examples of confident error it moves us little to hear that the prudent Maximalist believes Canada and South Africa to be English counties.

And the men who know so little of the plain facts of history and geography aspire to the governance of a vast Empire. Although for them Lloyd George is a place and Annexation is a man, they have no lingering doubt of their own competence. Their curiosity has never been tempted. They have risen above the necessity of knowledge. Their country is at war, and they have placed themselves by force at the head of their country. And yet it has not seemed part of their duty to study the rudiments of politics or to unroll a map of Europe. They, know not where their Allies live nor where their enemies. If thej did fumble the leaves of an atlas they would merely be disappointed that the frontiers of Lloyd George were not clearly marked.

So they drive their Fatherland to destruction without a glimmering sense of responsibility. Lenin, unrecognised by the Allies, will not long escape the consequences of his folly. But that he and his friends should have held the reins so long prompts us to ask what there is about politics that those who take it up as a business arrogantly deem that no preparation r.nd no training are necessary for the task. A man cannot make a pair of boots without sitting patiently at the feet of a master cobbler. The same man, humble in learning a handicraft, will assume the infinitely complicated control of a great State with no better furniture in his mind than a confused mass of futilities, whicli he proudly calls, "ideals." | - A DIVINE UTENSIL. And yet there is no loftier, no more difficult enterprise than government. He who would essay it should serve a humble apprenticeship, should pack his head with wisdom, and should then, approach the' duty which he has imposed upon himself with fear and trembling. So intent should he be upon the service of his country that he should not waste a thought upon his own gain. If at the proper time he should strike : with force, he should assume the responsibility of office with diffidence. "The Empire," says-a Chinese philosopher, "is a divine utensil which may not be roughly handled. He who meddles, mars. Lenin and his friends have meddled and marred. And thus, since the beginning, have States been the jplay things of the ignorant and greedy. When Aristophanes said the only thing against the sausasjp-seller was "the being able to read in any way," he spoke a universal truth. When he. told the sau-sage-seller to carry his present practice into his new calling, "to mangle, mince, I and mash, confound and hack, and jumble things together," he accurately described the art of government as it was pursued in ancient Athens, as if is pursued disastrously to-day by Lenin and his friends in modern Eussia.

And yet how vast a difference there is between the Nihilists of fifty years ago, whom Turkey-painted with a sure hand, and the revolutionaries who are now involving the Russian Empire in ruin! The strange exiles whom Turgenev sketched walking and talking under the trees at Baden were "intellectuals" one and all. They did not know too little about men and things; they knew too much They could not have mistaken Mr Gladstone for a disputed province. They smattered science, they sraattered art, they f mattered geography. They talked with equal ease about the Eng--lish dramatists and Gothic architecture. And it all ended in smoke. What Turgenev makes clear to us is that the revolutionaries .of his day were ineffectual not because they had not troubled to learn, but because they pretended to have mastered all the sciences. THE WORSHIP OF WORDS. But at one point the past and the present meet in accord. The past worshipped, the present adores the mere sound of words. When the Maximalists should justify their rule by action, they are content to talk, as the Nihilists were content to talk. They do not perceive, let us hope, that Lenin, their leader, is the kept servant of Germany. It is improbable that they have been at the pains to discover the causes and purposes of the war. They are surely ignorant of the effect which the success of their leader would have upon the future of their country. And so, the blind followers of a traitor, they write "liberty" upon their banners and cheerfully accept tho chains of slavery which treachery is forging for them. Meanwhile it. is good news that the Washington -Government, not content with refusing to deal with the ineffable Lenin, has announced that it will not countenance a separate peace made with Germany. 'He who is not with. us is against us, and if Lenin finds it worth his while to make any sort of alliance with the Germane, then he will be guilty of an overt act of enmity to us and to our Allies. The situation is clear enough, and his followers would never have got themselves into it if they had not in an excess of revolutionary zeal despised the acquisition of knowledge, and loudly professed that nothing was necessary for the ■proper conduct of government save "ideals."

That indeed is the moral of the Russian collapse—the danger of vague, misunderstood, and dimly expressed "ideals." Most profoundly moral maxims are mere instruments of suicide unless they are backed by brains and force. The poor silly creatures who talk of Mr. Annexation have fallen an easy prey to the hungry cunning of Lenin, and still believe themselves to be heaven-sent rulers. And yet the misery of Russia is not without ite uses. We have heard grumblings of revolution in our own land. The hardship of the war here, not unnaturally perhaps, aroused certain murmurs of discontent. But the last stages of the revolution in. Russia have given a plain warning to the discontented. The example of the Maximalists is not encouraging. At thie crisis of the world's fate no man shall be trusted with the business of government who lacks knowledge and experience, who is not ready to take all the advice which experts can offer him. Words are useless,; good intentions are useless. It is not enough that a Minister should mean well. He must show to all. the world that he can do well. The foolish ones, says the Preacher, "discard humility and. aim only at being first. Therefore they shall surely perish."