Set up to commemorate the social principles of Leo XIII, there stands in Rome a statue of a modern worker. Its significance is, I take it, unequivocal. Quite definitely it is not what a number of people would like it to be—an expression in stone of those picturesque stories with which the affluent are wont to edify their children about the accommodating fortitude and longanimity of the Destitute. Nor is it merely a comfortable eulogy of labour, an index to the spiritual desirability of mean circumstance (a gift dispensed with suspicious altruism by the prosperous). There is danger to the soul in destitution as well as in opulence. There is a fair distinction between poverty and pauperism. (Blessed are the poor, but in servility there is no virtue.) There is no libel on the Church so gross, yet apparently so ably substantiated from within, as that she encourages an attitude of laissez-faire towards the exploited, or presents economic misery solely to theotechnic treatment and compensation hereafter. A certain type of Christian is inspired by a convenient fatalism in respect of the disinheritance of half the world. Him alone have we to thank for the grossest falsehood of all—that religion is the opium of the masses.

The assertion of a heroic principle is intransigent and eternal. That is why, in speaking of Lenin, I speak first of the .Worker’s statue by the Church of St. John Lateran. Outside Russia there was none in November, 1917, that believed that the reign of Lenin would exceed, in duration, that of Kerensky.