Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/104

 its powers. Accordingly a revolution springing from a war is easier wrecked or sooner loses its motive force. How wholly different were the results of the bourgeois revolution in France where it sprung from an uprising of the people, from those in Germany, where it was imported through a number of wars. And the proletarian cause would have received much greater justice from the uprising of the Parisian proletariat if it had not been prematurely brought about by the war of '70 and '71, but had waited until a later period in which the Parisians would have had sufficient strength to have driven out Louis Napoleon and his band without a war.

We also have not the slightest ground to wish for an artificial acceleration of our advance by a war.

But things do not move according to our wishes. To be sure men make their own history, but they do not choose according to their desires the problems which they have to solve, nor the conditions under which they live, nor the means through which these problems are to be solved. If it came according to our wishes who of us would not prefer the peaceable to the violent road for which our present strength has perhaps not sufficiently grown and which perhaps would swallow us up. But it is not our task to express pious wishes and to demand of the world that it move in accordance with them, but to recognize the tasks, conditions and