THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE
Copyright 192o, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published February, 1920
From pages 390 - 391
"One of the basic postulates of profitable production is the equilibrium of all its essential factors-such as the laborer's wages, the cost of the machinery and the material, the administration. Bring discord into the harmony and the entire mechanism is out of gear.
"The Russian workman, who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his neighbor and none at all for his employer. "God Himself commands us to despoil such gentry," is one of his sayings. He is in a hurry to enrich himself, and he cares about nothing else. Nor can he realize that to beggar his neighbors is to impoverish himself. Hence he always takes and never gives ; as a peasant he destroys the forests, hewing trees and planting none, and robs the soil of its fertility. On analogous lines he would fain deal with the factories, exacting exorbitant wages that eat up all profit, and naively expecting the owner to go on paying them as though he were the trustee of a fund for enriching the greedy. The only people to profit by the system, and even they only transiently, were the manual laborers. The bulk of the skilled, intelligent, and educated artisans were held up to contempt and ostracized, or killed as an odious aristocracy. . . . "
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