It was something she would have liked to do, but Alex insisted that it was too dangerous.
He would have liked to organize a big move against the Bolsheviks from the west, but such a move could not be made while the Entente Powers were resolved to keep Germany out, and while they sympathized with all the new organizations hostile to RussiaEsthonia, Latvia and Poland.
His visiting espionage, as unkind critics put it - his secret diplomatic mission, as he would have liked to have it put himself - began in the summer of 1722, and he set out for it in company with a certain Madame de Rupelmonde, to whom he as usual made love, taught deism and served as an amusing travelling companion.
For, though that celebrated personage would have liked to be called, not " sophist " but " political philosopher," and tried to fasten the name of " sophist " upon his opponents the Socratics, it is clear from his own statement that he was commonly ranked with the sophists, and that he had no claim, except on the score of superior popularity and success, to be dissociated from the other teachers of political rhetoric. It is true that he was not a political sophist of the vulgar type, that as a theorist he was honest and patriotic, and that, in addition to his fame as a teacher, he had a distinct reputation as a man of letters; but he was a professor of political rhetoric, and, as such, in the phraseology of the day, a sophist.
He would have liked to make parliament, no doubt, a mere meeting for the voting of taxation with the smallest possible friction.
