ABSTRACT
There is, I believe, some modicum of genuine sympathy among our middle classes for Russia’s former aristocracy and landowners, but although it is much less rare than sympathy with the proletariat, I cannot believe that even it is either very deep or very widespread. It would be a great step forward in civilization if we could sympathize far more than we do even with the minority propertied class of other countries. A little sympathy, for instance, 61in the Settlement of 1918 might have come to the rescue of our common sense in ruling out some of the absurd ‘Indemnity’ schemes. But seeing that our social system does so much to crush sympathy on the part of the ‘ruling’ classes where the multitude of poorer brethren are concerned, we can hardly expect to develop this human faculty what one might describe as ‘naturally,’ even where our own class is concerned. Our middle class certainly do not feel sympathy for the dispossessed bourgeoisie of Russia to anything like the same lively degree that the Communists of Russia feel alive to the lot of the world’s ‘disinherited’ proletarians. The Government of our own country, however, recently acted no less drastically than the Communist Government as regards the wholesale confiscation of middle-class property. As the result of the Indemnity after the Great War, countless owners of capital in Central Europe were reduced to penury.
