Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/18

 about that. If, for all that, their conception of "the people" was so different from that of the Montagnards, then this may be explained only in that the Mountain party had gone one step further, in that it considered as "privileges" also such social institutions as to the Girondists appeared sacrosanct and necessary. It was a contested question which classes really must be regarded as "privileged." But that shows—and Paul Janet's explanations leave no room for any other interpretation—that according to the Montagnards all persons and classes that live by "labor," but the labor of others and not their own, belong in the category of the "privileged."

We must now seek to clear up the point of why the defenders of the cause of the working class incline toward a "despotic and cruel" republic. Why did they not rather appear as adherents of a "lawful, free and mild" republic? This circumstance must be traced back to two causes, one external, the other internal. Let us turn, first, to the external cause, that is, to the relations then existing between revolutionary