Page:Karl Kautsky - The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) - tr. William Edward Bohn (1910).djvu/215

 itself has been sufficient to produce a feeling of union among the socialistic labor movements of different countries. Their international consciousness has constantly grown stronger, and it needed only an external impulse to give to this fact visible expression.

This came about, as is well known, in connection with the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastile, which occurred at the International Congress of Paris in 1889. Since then the international character of the proletarian struggle has had a visible symbol in the May Day celebration. It has been strengthened, moreover, by regularly recurring international congresses. These congresses are made up, not of isolated enthusiasts, like the bourgeois peace congresses, but of the representatives of millions of working men and women. Every May Day shows in the most impressive manner that it is the masses of industrial workers in all the great centers of population of all civilized lands that feel in themselves the consciousness of the international solidarity of the proletariat, that protest against war and declare that national divisions are no longer divisions between peoples, but between exploiters.

Such a bridging of the chasm between the nations, such an international amalgamation of great sections of the people of different lands, the history of the world has never seen before. This phenomenon appears the more imposing when we remember that it has come into existence under the shadow of military armaments which, on their part, also offer a spectacle the