Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/58

46 yet the former still know how to keep the other down. If such a state of things lasts too long, the whole society disintegrates and breaks up. Very often, however, in such a case war effects what the rising class has not been equal to. It does this in two ways. War cannot be made without straining the whole of the energy of the nation. If, however, the nation is seriously divided against itself, war forces the ruling class to make concessions to the oncoming class to try to interest it in the life of the community, and thus to concede to it a power which it would not have obtained without the war.

If, on the other hand, the ruling class is incapable of such a sacrifice, or it is already too late, then war leads only too easily to a disaster in the field, which then brings along with it a disaster at home. By smashing up the army which a given régime has hitherto regarded as its surest support, it breaks up the régime itself.

Thus war has not unfrequently, under circumstances, proved a brutal, destructive, but withal an efficient instrument of progress, when other means failed.

The German bourgeoisie, for example, was by the shifting of Europe's economic centre of gravity to the coast countries of the Atlantic Ocean, and by the Thirty Years' War and its consequences, too enfeebled to free itself from feudalism by its own strength. It got rid of it, thanks to the Napoleonic wars and the wars of the Bismarck era. The legacy of 1848 was, as has often been proved, altogether carried out by the wars of the anti-revolutionary powers.

To-day we have arrived at a period of foreign and interior political antagonisms not unlike that of the fifties and sixties. Again there is a mass of inflammable material piled up. Ever greater and greater become the problems of inner and foreign politics which we have to solve, but none of the ruling classes and parties dare seriously undertake it. The least earnest attempt to do so would lead to great convulsions, and that is a thing which they are afraid of, knowing full well the enormous power of the proletariat, which would be set free each time.

I have pointed out before the stagnation of the inner political life, which finds its most remarkable expression in the decay of Parliamentarism. Hand in hand with this stagnation in home affairs proceeds also a stagnation in the foreign policy of Europe. People shrink from a spirited policy, which might lead to an international conflict, not from any ethical repudiation of war, but from fear of the revolution which would follow it. In consequence of this the whole statesmanship of our rulers, not only in home, but also in foreign affairs, consists in putting off the solution of questions for as long as it is possible, and in thus piling up a vast number of unsolved problems. Thanks to this there still exist to-day a number of States which a stronger revolutionary race had half a-century ago put on their death-beds, e.g., Austria and Turkey, and on the other side the interest of the bourgeoisie in an