The Diggers, however, are the most remarkable of these communistic groups, if only because they tried to put their ideas into practice. The movement was prefaced by an obscure pamphlet of December, 1648, with a title quite characteristic of the age, _Light Shining in Buckinghamshire_. Early in April of 1649 one Everard, a cashiered soldier of the New Model, with a few followers came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey “and began to dig, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans.” A voice, said Everard, had bidden him dig and plow the earth and receive the fruits thereof. They did not intend to meddle with enclosed land, but simply to take what was common and untilled and make it fruitful. For the time being General Fairfax, who seems to have regarded them as harmless fanatics, left them to their digging.
The apocalyptic touch is even more striking, if possible, in the Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy men. These held that the fourth monarchy of the Bible was drawing to a close, and that the fifth monarchy, or reign of the saints, was at hand.... They, of course, were the saints. They split, however, over the question as to whether or not it was proper for them to aid divine providence. Some of them held that the Lord was in himself quite equal to the task of overthrowing the mighty of this world; others believed that it was lawful, and presumably helpful, to combat the Lord’s enemies with the material sword, and hasten the day when the saints should possess riches and reign with Him on earth. Their dilemma reminds one somewhat of that facing nineteenth-century Socialists, forced to choose between the militants and the revisionists.
In comparison with the wealth of imagination the English put into the effort to bring heaven to earth, the other two revolutions seem poverty-stricken. Perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon belief that the French lack imaginative depth is valid, but surely this cannot be brought up against the Russians. Perhaps the answer is simply that as sources of imaginative inspiration neither the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century _philosophes_ nor the dialectic materialism of the Marxist can hold a candle to the King James version of the Bible. Yet France was by no means unproductive on the side of the lunatic fringe. The _Enragés_, led by Varlet and Roux, and based largely on the poorer sections of Paris, seem to have held a vaguely communistic doctrine. At any rate, they were definitely against the rich, against the new merchant aristocracy. The _Hébertistes_, another popular Parisian group sometimes confused with the _Enragés_, had largely yellow journalists and ward spoilsmen as leaders, but their main body must have nourished vaguely Utopian dreams. Then there was the incredible little circle around Catherine Théot, “Mother of God”--with Robespierre designated at least as one of the manifestations of God. It does indeed seem likely that republican professors in France are right, and that much of this was stirred up by Robespierre’s enemies to make him seem ridiculous; for even at the crisis period of revolutions some men retain a sense of humor. Yet the fact remains that Catherine Théot and her circle existed.
In Russia the completeness and quickness of the Bolshevik victory probably explains the relative lack of rival Utopias. It is true that from 1918 to 1921 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight off Whites and Allies on a dozen fronts, and that in a region like the Ukraine, for instance, you can find everything from Czarist rulers through mild _narodniks_ and partisan or guerilla rulers to pure Reds. But there is a dog-eat-dog cruelty in the Russian revolution that seems to exclude the mild delusions of an Everard or a Catherine Théot.
_IV. The Machinery of Dictatorship_
The dictatorship of the extremists is embodied in governmental forms as a rough-and-ready centralization. In detail these forms vary in our different societies, but the Commonwealth in England, the _gouvernement révolutionnaire_ in France and the Bolshevik dictatorship during the period of “war communism” in Russia all display uniformities of the kind the systematist in biology or zoology would not hesitate to catalogue as uniformities. Notably the making of final decisions in a wide range of matters is taken away from local and secondary authorities, especially if those authorities have been “democratically” elected, and is concentrated on a few persons in the national capital. Though names like Cromwell, Robespierre, and Lenin stand out as those of rulers, and although these men did exercise unquestioned power in many ways, the characteristic form of this supreme authority is that of a committee. The government of the Terror is a dictatorship in commission.
This centralized executive commission--Committee of Public Safety, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Vtsik)--rests on a supine if talkative legislative body--Rump, Convention, All-Russian Congress of Soviets--and gets its orders carried out by an extemporized bureaucracy, largely recruited from party workers, and from that club-sect-pressure-group we have seen as the body of the extremist group. The old law courts cannot work, at least in their traditional manner. They are therefore supplemented by extraordinary courts, revolutionary tribunals, or are wholly transformed by new appointments and by special jurisdictions. Finally, a special sort of revolutionary police appears. The Russian Cheka is familiar to everyone with the slightest knowledge of recent history. In France the _comité de surété générale_ and the _comités révolutionnaires_ fulfilled these police functions; in the English revolution they were carried out very effectively by the new Independent parish clergy, aided by various _ad hoc_ committees in the army. But in England the whole fabric of governmental centralization was rudimentary and simple--Cromwell’s own anomalous dictatorship, the new Court set up by the Rump in March, 1650, in which legislative, administrative, and judicial powers were as thoroughly combined as ever in the Star Chamber, the curious experiment of the Major Generals in 1655-56. The fact of the centralization in England is, however, unquestionable. Even the sacred functions of that holiest guardian of English local liberties, the Justice of the Peace, were under attack all during the domination of the extremists.
These extemporized dictatorships were faced not only with the ordinary problems of government, but with civil and foreign war, and with at least a certain number of actual reform measures which they had to try to put through. Notably in the French and Russian revolutions, the new government had to administer what, to avoid dispute as to the meaning of Socialism, we may call measures of economic planning--fixed prices and wages, managed currency, food rationing, and so on. We need not here bother with the problem as to whether in France these were purely war measures or not. The point is that the government found itself obliged to try to administer them. In Russia, of course, there were conscious efforts to embody Marxist Socialism in working institutions.
But these were all very rough-and-ready forms of dictatorship. The governments of the Terror were on the whole much less efficient, less effectively absolute than many peacetime governments with nowhere near their reputation for absoluteness. Indeed, one of the reasons why they seem so tyrannical and hard to bear, even retrospectively, is precisely because they were so inefficient. They got their big tasks done--saved England, France, and Russia from dissolution or conquest, but they did it very messily and, in detail, very badly. The actual administrators were usually inexperienced, were often petty fanatics, often incompetent blow-hards who had risen to prominence in the clubs or the party. They were under tremendous pressure from above to get results. They were frequently in charge of operations very close to the heart of the revolution as an economic movement--confiscation of Royalist estates and clerical livings in England, disposition of the confiscated lands of clergy and _émigrés_ in France, nationalization of land and factories in Russia--which gave them grand opportunities for graft. They had to work with a population many if not most of whom were distrustful or hostile. Small wonder then that these reigns of terror stand out rather for irregular acts of violence, that their full history is a matter of incredible complexity. Nothing is more illuminating in the study of these revolutions than the study of local history. Here you see the Terror as it really was, no steady and efficient rule from above, as in an army or in Sparta, but a state of suspense and fear, a dissolution of the sober little uniformities of provincial life. Much depends on the accidents of personality--a sensible squire, a moderate and able local revolutionary or two, and a given village may go through a revolution fairly serenely. In others, terror may rule as bitterly as in the capital.