Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/76

 in capitalist circles called forth by this crisis were aggravated still further by the simultaneous sharpening of competition in the means of life from America and Russia, which apparently promised to end all agricultural production in Western Europe.

The universal misery of farmers, artisans and proletarians, the dwindling confidence of the bourgeoisie, the brutal suppression of Socialist efforts—since 1871 in France, and no less in Germany and Austria since 1878—all this appeared to indicate the early approach of a catastrophe.

But the governmental institutions that had been created between 1848 and 1871 corresponded too closely to the necessities of the great mass of the population for them to collapse at this time. On the contrary, the more threatening the danger of revolution appeared, which could be only of a proletarian, anti-capitalist character, the closer the wealthy classes clung to the government.

The small capitalists and farmers, moreover, found the newly acquired political rights, and especially the ballot, very effective means for influencing the government, and of obtaining all sorts of material concessions from it. They were all the more willing to purchase help from the government by political services, the more unbearable their previous allies in political struggles became.

So it was that the widespread discontent which arose from economic depression and political oppression produced only insignificant revolutions. The most important results of these, as has already been remarked, were the overthrow of Bismarck in 1890 and, in the course of a rather violent transformation of the French constitution, the appearance of Boulangerism in France in 1889. With these even the appearance of revolutionary situations disappeared.

Just about the time of these political transformations the long industrial depression ceased. A period of most