Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/87

 not only liberated the peasants from the feudal burdens, but its foreign policy, as we shall presently see, in spite of stupendous difficulties, had till February 1920 saved the country from foreign invasion. Its internal policy of democratic tolerance and liberty, which did not, however, signify apathy or weakness, but was coupled with energy and conscious initiative, has averted an internal catastrophe. Within recent years, when rebellions have broken out almost everywhere from the Rhine to the Pacific Ocean, Georgia was the only country, with the exception of German Austria, that has escaped violence. A few attempts at rebellion in outlying districts in the south and the north are hardly worth mentioning.

This peace and security have commended the Social-Democratic regime to the peasants.

Perhaps in no other country at the present time are the conditions for friendly relations between the peasantry and the proletariat, and for the sympathetic neutrality of the former towards industrial socialisation, so favourable as in Georgia.

Thus we find that in this period of revolution the Government which was most firmly supported at home was the Georgian Government.

It is true the external situation was of quite a different cast.