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ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

and to stir up trouble abroad? Perhaps this isno worse and has more purpose than the greedy,warlike, and imperialist propensities of otherGovernments; but it must be far better thanthese to shift me out of my rut. How can Iaccept a doctrine which sets up as its bible,above and beyond criticism, an obsolete eco-nomic textbook which I know to be not onlyscientifically erroneous but without interest orapplication for the modern world? How can Iadopt a creed which, preferring the mud to thefish, exalts the boorish proletariat above thebourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with what-ever faults, are the quality in life and surelycarry the seeds of all human advancement?Even if we need a religion, how can we find itin the turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops? Itis hard for an educated, decent, intelligent sonof Western Europe to find his ideals here, un-less he has first suffered some strange and horridprocess of conversion which has changed all hisvalues.

Yet we shall miss the essence of the new re-ligion if we stop at this point. The Communist may justly reply that all these things belongnot to his ultimate Faith but to the tactics ofRevolution. For he believes in two things: theintroduction of a New Order upon earth, andthe method of the Revolution as the only meansthereto . 1 The New Order must not be judged

1 I use the term “Communism” to mean the New Order,and not, as is the practice in British Labour politics, to mean theRevolution as a means thereto.