Only to minds financially insane or criminally degenerate could such a system seem "sane and logical." Their carefully kept store of gold shows that the Bolshevist dictators are not insane but criminal. They understand their game, which is that of bunco-steering to "exploit" labor on the largest scale the world has ever seen. Honest paper money is a promise to pay, for value received, in gold, silver or good merchandise. If this form is used by these frauds, it is with the deliberate intention of repudiation, the possibility of payment being also destroyed by the floods of the stuff turned out. If the paper given is not a promise to pay, it is circulated simply through the tyranny of men who by threat of punishment or starvation force workingmen to exchange a day's labor for a bit of food and a piece of paper. In either case the labor exploiters in the Kremlin exact from Russia's workingmen, in exchange for a little food and a wad of paper, a genuine value, the product of hard labor, which these get-rich-quick Wallingfords can turn into gold, or exchange with the world for anything they want. All that Russian workingmen get is semi-starvation and the temporary delusion, conveyed to them in fine speeches, that they are "in the game," whereas they are only its dupes.
The worthless character of the paper money, which the workmen nevertheless have to take and spend to keep soul and body together, is shown by the fact that the peasants refuse it. In his cable printed in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920, Eyre says that "the peasant twenty miles outside of Moscow ... has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear," yet "refuses to sell his products for money except that proportion of them that he is compelled to turn over to the Soviets at a fixed price. In private trading," Eyre continues, "he will take in exchange for his foodstuffs only manufactured articles, clothing and other things he needs." Thus the peasant is fortunate in that he lives on land where he can at least raise enough to eat; whereas the "proletarian," in whose behalf the Socialists pretend to have made the Russian revolution, is most of all victimized by it.