1065

1 GR 441 JM Day Letter. 4:45 p.m.

Grove Park Inn, Asheville, N.C., Jan. 4,1918.

Hon. Jos. P. Tumulty,
The White House,
Washington, D.C.

Will Shepherd just back from Russia is here on honeymoon. He has written
his interpretation of the unusual developement just taking place and as it is
so vital and so clear, I asked him to let me wire it to you imediately,
believing it of interest to the President:

The laboring man's government of Russia has outmanoeuvered the autocrat-
ic goverment of Germany in the Brest-Litorsk peace parley. They have
put the Kaiser in the position of trying to carry water on both shoulders.
Trotzsky and Lenine are not weak simple men; they are recognized in
Russia and in many parts of Europe as being great writers and thinkers.
In a direct masterful way they have proved to onlooking world that the
Germany of the Kaiser is not on the square. They have also proved this
to the Russian people. The plan of Trotzsky and Lenine and of the council
of workmen and soldiers is to get the laboring people, the plain people
of whom Wilson spoke in his message to Congress, to gather in all
countries of the world to demand an end of the war. It was on this
theory that they agreed to the armistice with Germany. The council of
workmen and soldiers representing as far as it could the common people of
Russia, thrust out its hands in an effort to clasp the hand of the comon
people, the democracy of Germany. They saw a hand extended from Germany
in the vague mists of German diplomacy. It was not a clearly defined hand
but they grasped it in the hope that it might be the hand of their
democratic brothers in Germany. A few days of negotiations showed that
instead of having seized the horny hand of democracy they had shaken a
hand that wore the gauntlet of militarism, and to-day the Russians have
broken the handclasp. Their dream of reaching through and beyond militar-
ism and Kaiserism to the German conmon people has been shattered. If there
is any German democracy such as the Russians hoped to encounter they
have found the Kaiser's stonewall between it and themselves. Perhaps it
exists. Proof that there are wars in Germany anong the masses waiting
to hear the Russian message is seen in the fact that the Germans are
preventing the Russians from distributing pamphlets among the army,
and that the Prime Minister has refused to permit German Socialists to
meet in official session in Stockholm with Russian Socialists. The peace
talk of the Russians is posioning Germany; it is a poison gas that the
Germans first used after the revolution; it is being blown back on them
now. The Russians are showing to the German democracy that the German

41724