3°4

ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

ledged income exceeding ^8 to j£io a week.Nor is there any possibility of large gains exceptby taking the same sort of risks as attach tobribery and embezzlement elsewhere—not thatbribery and embezzlement have disappeared inRussia or are even rare, but any one whose ex-travagance or whose instincts drive him to suchcourses runs serious risk of detection and pen-alties which include death.

Nor, at the present stage, does the systeminvolve the actual prohibition of buying andselling at a profit. The policy is not to forbidthese professions, but to render them precariousand disgraceful. The private trader is a sortof permitted outlaw, without privileges or pro-tection, like the Jew in the Middle Ages—anoutlet for those who have overwhelming in-stincts in this direction, but not a natural oragreeable job for the normal man.

The effect of these social changes has been,I think, to make a real change in the pre-dominant attitude towards money, and willprobably make a far greater change when anew generation has grown up which has knownnothing else. People in Russia, if only becauseof their poverty, are very greedy for money—at least as greedy as elsewhere. But money-making and money-accumulating cannot enterinto the life-calculations of a rational man whoaccepts the Soviet rule in the way in which theyenter into ours. A society of which this is evenpartially true is a tremendous innovation.

Now all this may prove Utopian, or destruc-