I remember once hearing a Bolshevik discuss the difficulties of a Soviet representative at an imaginary pan-European rapprochement. I asked him whether ne referred specifically to confusion and embarrassment in ethical issues, and he answered me with a frank outline of the hybrid, and indeed unreal, nature of an entente between traditional Western democracy and the Soviet. He talked, too, I recollect, of the obvious unfruitfulness of external arbitration in matters of justice and discipline in the U.S.S.R.

This was long before M. Litvinoff applied himself (for the benefit of Great Britain) to the defence of the G.P.U. procedure in respect of foreign nationals. If sabotage (an extremely comprehensive term, by the way) is a sin crying to the State for vengeance, and if a man be adjudged guilty by a constitutional tribunal functioning normally, who can complain because the tribunal is the G.P.U., or because (the discharge of its austere commission being a trifle arbitrary) its patients, once convicted, are dispatched swiftly and without show?