Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/121

 Consequently every state must regard its neighbors, and the working class of every state must look upon its rulers as liable upon the slightest provocation, or as a result of any accident, to release the most inconceivable horrors upon it. All this is bound to produce a new transformation in the little capitalist class.

Naturally the moral bankruptcy of the ruling class is most complete in those localities where it is inaccessible to the mass of the people, Some great catastrophe, like the Russo-Japanese war, is required to expose the full rottenness of the system. In ordinary times it is only here and there that some special unskillfulness lifts a corner of the blanket that at other times shamefully conceals all. The class-conscious proletariat are touched but little by such disclosures. The laborers are much more antagonistic to the ruling class than formerly and do not deceive themselves about its moral qualities.

It is different with the small capitalist class. The more it becomes untrue to its democrauic past, the more it crawls, under the government and expects help from it, and the more it trusts in that government and its stability, and all the greater its horror when the foundation is torn away and its prestige goes to the devil.

There is a simultaneous increase in the pressure by the great capitalist combines and through the demands of the state upon their purses. This does not improve their confidence in the ruling class.

That confidence must completely disappear when the incapacity, indiscretion and corruption of the governing class frivolously precipitates a catastrophe—a war or a coup d'etat—that would expose the country to extreme distress. The blind rage of the little capitalists would be all the more easily and fiercely turned against the class that chanced to be ruling at such a time in proportion as it had expected much from this class previously, and the