Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution - tr. Wood Simons (1902.djvu/82

 in which there are no Social Democrats, as, for example, the Saxon and Prussian Chambers, lose their influence and their creative power much more rapidly than the others.

The demoralization of Parliaments has various different causes. The most essential causes are not those that belong to Parliamentary tactics, which through an alteration in the order of business, or of the sphere of Parliament, abolish its efficiency. The most essential lies in the character of the classes which are able through Parliament to significantly influence government. If Parliamentarism is to prosper, two preliminary conditions are necessary: the first, a single strong majority, and the second, a great social goal toward which this majority energetically strives and toward which they can force the government also. Both of these existed in the Golden Age of Parliamentarism. So long as capitalism represented the future of the nation, all classes of the people that possessed any Parliamentary significance, and especially the mass of the intellectuals, stood for freedom of capitalism. This was true of a majority of the small capitalists, and even the laborers followed the bourgeois leadership.

Liberalism thus stood as a united party with great aims. The struggle of the Liberalists for Parliament and in Parliament gave the latter its significance. Since then, as I have described above, a new development has risen.