The Russian Moloch

...By their "extinguishing the lights of heaven" and substituting for them the naphtha flares of class war, the friends of the proletariat seem to have accomplished this much at least for the proletariat's children...

...Its condition may be imagined from the words of the report itself, which states that "there are hardly any children of this category who have not acquired the drug habit or suffered from venereal disease...

...In the interview which Archbishop Cieplak accorded The Commonweal a few weeks ago, the late Catholic Primate of Russia only once departed from the measured language that marked all his public utterances in America...

...This was when, referring to the edict in Soviet Russia which forbids religious instruction of any kind for young children, he mentioned the mocking clause which permits a choice between belief and disbelief to be made when the age of eighteen has been reached...

...Kalinina and Mme...

...By leaving this piteous debris in its wake, the Russian Revolution is only following the course which other revolutions and "reformations" had marked out for it...

...Krupskaya (the last the widow of apotheosized Lenin) to whose unceasing efforts the belated crusade of rescue, if it ever takes place, will be due, are not overstating the case when they call the condition of these abandoned children "Soviet Russia's vilest sore...

...This is in the form of a report presented in connection with the growing scandal of hordes of homeless and wandering children who have been thrown on the harsh mercies of society owing to the death or disappearance of parents and guardians...

...The little ones who might have climbed on His knee and looked in His eyes unafraid, may crawl to the all-saving Breast now, at best—and if heaven is merciful—child-prostitutes and child-addicts, innocent monsters, more sinned against than sinning, whom evil claimed before the difference between good and evil could be made known...

...Further revolting details are given upon the "streets, cellars and dens of corruption" from which the poor waifs are to be rescued, only to be consigned to prisonorphanages where "there must be absolutely no chance of escape from the iron regime...

...It becomes evident that one by-product at least of the establishment of social justice in Russia upon Marxian formulas, is a slow martyrdom of the innocents, which makes Herod's brief massacre seem merciful in comparison...

...THE RUSSIAN MOLOCH /TpHE penalty paid by the weak and helpless when ¦*• social change is secured by violent means is strikingly pictured in a document drawn up during the last days of January for the Soviet government by Health-Commissar Sameshko...

...Human nature of the average and ordinary unillumined and compassionate sort, which has not yet been clarified by Marxian logic, may be excused if it shudders at the remedy hardly less than at the disease, and if death does not present itself as a slightly more desirable consummation than one of these hells-onearth to which no word or counsel of the Divine Physician, who helped the leper and converted the Magdalen, must ever penetrate...

...And in defining the cure that is to be administered, the Soviet government only too plainly foreshadows what the result is likely to be whenever men, after a convulsive effort to throw off Ring Log, find themselves subjected to the regime of King Stork...

...A conservative estimate, which does not take account of the vast regions of White Russia, the Caucasus or the Ukraine, places the numbers of this pitiful army at 300,000...

...For the enemy of souls does not wait upon Soviets, however docile to his will they strive to show themselves...

...There is no room here," the Sameshko report goes on, in language from which every trace of indignation or compassion seems to be purposely excluded, "for sentimentalism . . . These children would have to be placed in reformatories organized on the lines of correction of the Ogpu [Tcheka] where firmness and iron discipline reign...