Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/50

 salon of the modem passenger steamer would have been unheard of fifty years ago even in a royal pleasure yacht.

So much for the increasing exploitation of the proletariat. But is not this economic factor counterbalanced by the increasing political approach of the classes? Do not the bourgeoisie more and more recognize the laborer as their political and social equals?

There is no doubt that the proletariat is gaining rapidly in political and social respects.

If its rise in economic relations remains behind that of the bourgeoisie, this gives rise to a continually increasing enviousness and discontent. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of the last fifty years is the rapid and unbroken rise of the proletariat in moral and intellectual relations.

Not many decades ago the proletariat was so low that there were even socialists that expected the worst results for culture from the conquest of the proletariat. In 1850 Rodbertus wrote: "The most threatening danger at present is that we shall have a new barbarian invasion, this time coming from the interior of society itself to lay waste custom, civilization and wealth."

At the same time Heinrich Heine declared that the future belonged to the communist. "This confession, that the future belongs to the communist, I make in sorrow and greatest anxiety. This is in no way a delusion. In fact,