Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/100

 class which they would not have attained without the war.

If the governing class is not capable of such a sacrifice or yields too late for it to be effective then war can easily lead to defeat from without which carries with it a collapse within. A government resting mainly upon an army is overthrown as soon as the army is defeated.

So it has not unfrequently happened that war has been an extremely efficient means, even if brutal and destructive, to bring about a progress of which other means were incapable.

The German bourgeois, for example, was rendered too weak by the transference of the economic center of Europe to the sea coast of the Atlantic Ocean, and by the thirty years' war and its results to overthrow by its own strength the feudal absolutism. It was freed from this only through the Napoleonic wars and then later through the wars of the Bismarckian era. The legacy of 1848 was realized upon mainly through the wars of the counter-revolutionary forces as these forces had themselves been formerly established.

Today we are in a period of external and internal political antagonisms analogous to that which existed in the 50's and 60's. Once more a mass of social tinder has accumulated. The problems of external and internal politics demanding solution become ever more tremendous. But none of the ruling classes or parties dare earnestly to attempt their solution because this