Anyhow, many people believed that it was none of our business to
suppress the Russian Revolution or to punish the leaders of it, and it
was suspected by British working-men that the real motive behind our
action was not a noble enthusiasm for liberty, but an endeavor to
establish a reactionary government in Russia in order to crush a
philosophy of life more dangerous to the old order in Europe than high
explosives, and to get back the gold that had been poured into Russia
by England and France. By a strange paradox of history, French
journalists, forgetting their own Revolution, the cruelties of
Robespierre and Marat, the September Massacres, the torture of Marie
Antoinette in the Tuileries, the guillotining of many fair women of
France, and after 1870 the terrors of the Commune, were most horrified
by the anarchy in Russia, and most fierce in denunciation of the
bloody struggle by which a people made mad by long oppression and
infernal tyrannies strove to gain the liberties of life.
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