542 THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN BRITISH CAPTIVITY 543 In British Captivity By LEON TROTZKY. consider it at this time a matter of political necessity to publish the documents bearing upon my imprisonment by the British for the period of one month. The bourgeois pressthe same press which has been spreading defamatory statements of the worst black hundred type against political emigrants who were forced to return to Russia by way of Germany appeared to be deaf and dumb the moment it came in contact with the lawless attack by England upon the Russian emigrants who were returning home by way of the Atlantic ocean. The servile Social patriotic, now the ministerial press is not acting more decently, and this press has no urgent motives to explain the ticklish circumstances why the brand new Socialist ministers who are at this time still professing to be so highly respectful to the emigrants, their teachers, are in fact the nearest and most immediate allies of Lloyd George, who is grabbing by the collars those same teachers upon the great Atlantic highway. In this tragicomical episode is revealed with sufficient convincingness the relation of England ruling class towards the Russian revolution, as well as the general meaning of the sacred alliance into whose service citizens Tseretelli, Tchernoff and Skobeleff have entered.
For whatever assertions may be made by the left ministerial groups and parties, the ministerial socialists are fully responsible for the government of which they appear to be a part.
The government of Lvov Tereshtchenko is in alliance not with the English revolutionary socialists, MacLean, Askew and others, whom the ruling imperialists of England are keeping in prisons, but with their jailers Lloyd George and Henderson.
The first two years of the war spent in France. There had the opportunity of closely observing the experiment of socialists in the ministry during the epoch of the liberating war. Guesde and Sembat, of course, justified their acts by alleging the unprecedented nature of the circumstances which compelled them to enter the war cabinet: the fatherland was in danger, the Germans were at the gates of Paris, general devastation, the necessity of defending the republic and the traditions of the revolution, in short, they have advanced the same arguments which are now being used in a more naive form by Tseretelli and Tchernoff in order to prove that their ministerialism is distinguishable from that of Guesde and Sembat as is heaven from earth.
With the kind participation of the French comrade ministers was expelled from France for my work on the daily Russian international paper Nashe Slovo (Our Word) and for taking part in the Zimmerwald movement. The Swiss government, in obedience to the order of the Czar diplomats, refused to admit me. French gendarmes, who have donned civilian clothes to keep up the honor of the republic have taken me to the Spanish frontier. Three days later the Prefect of Paris, Lorane, telegraphed to the police of Madrid about the dangerous agitator who had crossed the Spanish frontier. The Spanish guardians of peace could think of nothing better than to arrest me. Having freed me, after an inquiry in Parliament from their model prison at Madrid, the Spanish government escorted me under convoy to the extreme southwest of the Iberian peninsula, Cadiz. From here the of ficials wanted to send me immediately to Havana, and it was after threatened to resist and after the intervention by Spanish socialists and republicans, that was permitted to leave with my family for New York.
After a stay of two months, we got the news of the Russian revolution. group of Russian exiles, among them the writer of these lines, made an attempt to start for Russia on the first steamer. But the Russian Socialist proposes and Lloyd George disposes. At Halifax the English officers took us off and interned us in a camp for war prisoners. Regarding