Lenin

It will be a century's work to "estimate" Lenin. To The Evening Mail, Manhattan, is given credit for the briefest, and possibly the most clearly characteristic summary of American editorial opinion:

Few men have seen deeper and farther than Lenin did. He had all the attributes of a great man except love and humility, but those lacks made him the cynical organizer of a system in which he ceased to believe. Not love but hate was the impelling motive of his life, and so he destroyed one tyranny, that of the czar, only to set up another.

Lenin's intellectuality was put at the service of a bloodless ideal, that of a mechanical civilization in which economic forces were everything and human forces nothing. He strove to realize it by methods that were as horrible as any that Nero in ancient Rome or the worst inquisitor of the middle ages used. There has not been in history a man who so well exemplified the hellishness of a great intellect utterly barren of the noble influences that come from the heart.

"All great thoughts," said Vauvenaurgues, "come from the heart." All Lenin's thoughts came from his head. They were cold as death itself, and they are today as dead as their source.

Of few men can it be more truly said that for lack of human sympathy they lost the chance to leave a great part of the world better than they found it.