Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/70

 It is one of the strangest ironies of history that the Gladstonian stage should have been looked upon in Germany as foretelling our future and most loudly praised as a firmly acquired conquest, at just the moment when the Gladstonian heritage was being scattered to the winds and Chamberlain was becoming the hero of the English populace.

I will freely grant that I, too, formerly had great hopes of England. While I did not expect that the Gladstonian stage would ever be transported to Germany, still I did hope that because of the peculiarity of English conditions the development from capitalism to Socialism might be peaceably accomplished, not through a social revolution, but by means of a series of progressive concessions by the ruling class to the proletariat. The experience of the last few years has destroyed these hopes for England also. The English internal policy now begins to shape itself on the model of its German competitor. May it have a corresponding reaction upon the English proletariat.

We now see in just how far the acceptance of the idea of a softening of class antagonisms and a drawing together of the bourgeoisie and proletariat is justified. To be sure, it is not wholly built on air, it is supported by certain facts, but its defect consists in having accepted as universal, facts that are really confined to a narrow sphere. It considers a few divisions of the Intellectuals as the whole bourgeoisie, and