The system of Marx is as logical as that of Calvin, and as limited as that of Calvin. In a generation or so it will have gone into the limbo of most heresies, along with the heresy of Calvin. But meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution, just as the other poisoned the English Revolution. It will have had to cut across all the traditions of Holy Russia, exactly as the other had to cut across all the traditions of Merry England. It forces men to an unnatural war against the popular idea of Easter, just as the other forced them to an unnatural war against the popular idea of Christmas. The movement is forced, almost against its will, to take a superior tone towards the peasant glorified by Tolstoy, as the other movement did towards the play-actors made splendid by the tradition of Shakespeare. The moral is that the working classes ought to fight for freedom and not a formula, even if it happens to be held by the intellectuals who lead them in the fight. They should state their very real rights as rights, and their very real wrongs as wrongs; and not confuse them with something which some professor thinks right and the next professor will prove wrong. The great wrong of our history was that all property was taken from the people, and the human remedy for it is to make property a common experience among the people. Men want houses, they want land, they want leisure and liberty, they want the self-respect of independence, and men will always want these things. They will not always want books of Marxian economics, any more than they want books of Calvinistic theology. What they do want is something much more like the destruction of the proletariat than the dictatorship of the proletariat. For it is the destruction of the slave and the creation of the citizen.
-July 12, 1919, Illustrated London News
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