preached by Rousseau; and it is false. Fraud is increasing in sophistication and scale; violence makes it ever more dangerous for women to walk about the streets at night; thuggery becomes ever more brazen and organised. We are not evolving slowly towards a better world. We are rapidly becoming a worse one. Let us hope that law and order does not break down; but just suppose that things got so bad that we had to admit that the Victorian remedy of custody had failed to work, that the Elizabethan remedy of community sentences had also failed to work, and that we were faced with the prospect of having to abandon the rule of law altogether; we would all have to hope that someone would be man enough to make the correct decision. Let us hope that the present reforms are not an attempt to imitate the rush of the Gadarene Swine.
One has to be practical. I have a lot of sympathy for Kerensky, whose intentions were of the best, and of whom people hoped so much, but whose lack of ruthlessness in failing to keep the Bolsheviks in prison opened the door to their obtaining power. Looking back, I suppose the big mistake was for the Provisional Government, after the Revolution of March 1917, to have promised to continue the war against Germany. It was beyond the power of Russia to do so, and Russian regiments mutinied. So Kerensky did not inherit a happy state of affairs, when he came to power in July 1917. Probably Russian participation in the war was doomed after the failure of the imaginative, but incompetent Dardanelles campaign. The justification for the Dardanelles campaign was that the strategy of the indirect approach often seems to work. For example, the turning point in the American Civil War was the capture of Vicksburg by Grant, followed as it was by Sherman's terrible march through Georgia. It finished the war; whereas the confrontation on the Potomac might never have done so. Victory in the Dardanelles might have brought greater rewards than slogging it out on the Western Front. Certainly Churchill thought so. But surely the…