Thus horrible butcheries are no longer necessary because no one longer dares to resist. All liberty, all self-government, all self-initiative have been crushed in the iron vise of dictated policy. This is the case, as Eyre says, "twenty-seven months after the social revolution gripped the nation in a clutch of steel that never has been relaxed since." Is not such mental, moral and spiritual death a greater calamity than physical death?
Sixthly, the common people, crushed under this experimental Socialist Juggernaut, are starving to death. In the article last cited, in the "World" of February 27, 1920, Eyre says:
"The food problem is hideously acute, yet not quite so critical as at the outset of the winter. In Moscow, Petrograd and other industrial centres some 8,000,000 human beings, of whom only a tiny fraction are Bolsheviki, are slowly but surely starving to death. There are abundant food stocks in the south and east, but they cannot be carried in sufficient quantity over the semi-paralyzed railroads.... "Trotzky himself defined the industrial situation as a race between economic reconstruction and reversion to savagery."
Seventhly, craving for food is one of the things which make it impossible to shut out the food speculator, whose extortion at least helps to prolong life. As Eyre says:
"City and country food speculation, which the dictatorship thus far confesses its inability to suppress or even control, is fast developing a new capitalist class right under the Communists' noses. One of the most painful sights in Russia is some pale, thin, tottering old woman paying out more than she earns in a week for a few lumps of sugar bought from a well-fed trader from the country in the Sukfarevka, Moscow's open air market place."