Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/43

Rh employers and employed, which distinguished a previous generation. Nay, public opinion in the propertied and professional classes is, in fact, more hostile to trade unionism and strikes than was the case a generation ago."

As a consequence of this change the trade unions are now most seriously limited in their efficiency by the English courts of law. In place of free trade there is now a tendency to raise the price of the necessaries of life by a customs tariff; the policy of colonial conquest begins afresh, and with it coercion in Ireland. Only the remodelling of the army on Prussian lines remains to be done, and then England will follow in the train of Germany in her Polish policy, her customs policy, her social policy, her foreign policy, her military policy.

Does not that show clearly that it is possible to study the future of England in Germany (and also in America), that English conditions have ceased to paint our future? The stage of the "softening down of the class antagonisms" and of the opening of the era of "social peace" was confined to England, and is even there a thing of the past. Gladstone was the most prominent representative of that policy of conciliating antagonisms by concessions, which corresponded to the mode of thinking of the industrial capital of England then dominating economically all other classes and countries. The most prominent representative of the new methods of money capital now fighting for supremacy is Mr. Chamberlain. It is among the strangest ironies of history that the Gladstone stage of social development is held up for our admiration in Germany as our future and as England's achievement never to be lost, at the very time when the Gladstone heritage crumbles into dust, and Chamberlain is the hero of the English people.

I will openly confess that I, too, formerly had laid great hopes on England. Though I did not expect that the Gladstone era would ever pass to Germany, I did, however, hope that in England in consequence of its peculiar conditions the evolution from capitalism to Socialism would proceed not by means of a social revolution, but peacefully by a series of progressive concessions to the proletariat on the part of the ruling classes. The experience of the last few years has destroyed my hopes for England, too. The English home policy now commences to shape itself on the lines of their German rivals. May this, also, have a corresponding effect on the English proletariat.

We now see how far the assumption of a gradual softening down of the class antagonism, of an approach between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is justified. It turns out to have been not wholly without foundation in fact, but its mistake lay in that it generalised facts which were limited to a narrow area. It substituted a small section of the intellectuals for the entire bourgeoisie, and represented a particular social tendency of England, and that already belonging to the past, as the general and ever-growing tendency of the entire capitalist mode of production.