BOLSHEVISM: THE ENIGMA.

The past few months have witnessed the rapid spread of a movement among the industrial classes of Europe and America which threatens to undermine the very foundations of society and whose tenets run directly counter to those of a well ordered and peaceful democracy. The question of the hour with regard to what is known journalistically as "Bolshevism" is: where did it come from and whither does it tend?

An overseas correspondent of the New York Times declared in a recent news dispatch to that paper that "Bolshevism . . . . is the revengeful shadow of reckless modern materialism." Surely this definition by one who is in close touch with the movement and its leaders has its lesson for those who are working frantically to stay the onward course of this anarchic engine of destruction. Their naive attempts to decapitate a beast of this nature by military imprisonment and misdirected propaganda results only in three heads springing up where one grew before. To rid society of the menace of Bolshevism, we must strike at its roots which are to be found in just this "reckless modern materialism."

Governor Coolidge is perhaps gifted with far greater foresight than his opponents will allow him when he says that in reconstructing education the classics must not be forgotten. "After all," he says, "idealism is the only practical thing." It is in humanizing, in leavening human society, then, that we can overcome those forces which, shooting up from the soil of a "reckless" materialism, work adversely to the finer and nobler aspirations of human society. If we are to choose between leaven and dynamite in reconstructing civilization, by all means let it be the former!