Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/16

 only difference between him and me is that he has the most wonderful optimism in regard to our opponents, and the most fearful pessimism in regard to the principal aims of the party and its future."—(Proceedings of Congress, p. 283.)

One of the most significant of the prophecies of Bebel which has been fulfilled was the one which he made in 1873 that the Center, which then had sixty seats, would soon have a hundred, and that the Bismarckian fight on the Catholic Center (Kulturkampf) would have a miserable end, and would contribute to Bismarck's overthrow.

Recently some have done me the honor to place me in the ranks of the "prophets." I could not well be in better company.

I have been reproached with some of the things that I wrote in the series of articles in the Neue Zeit and in the introduction to my work on Ethics concerning the revolution, which it is claimed the course of events proved fundamentally wrong.

Is this correct?

In the introduction to my "Ethics" I wrote:

"We are about to enter upon a period, whose length no one knows, during which no Socialist can engage in quiet labors, but where our work must be that of constant fighting. * * * The tools of the Czar are eager in their work as were the Albas and the Tillys in the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—not with deeds of military heroism, but of brutal murder and arson. The West European champions of law and order defend these actions as restoring legal conditions. But just as little as the soldiers of the Hapsburgs, in spite of momentary successes, were able to restore Catholicism in North Germany and Holland, are the Cossacks of the Romanoffs