Page:Karl Kautsky - The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution - tr. John Bertram Askew (1903).djvu/62

50 little else than petty bourgeois, only differing from the rest by a somewhat greater lack of culture, and having for their most exalted ideal to copy their masters, to follow them in their hypocritical respectability, in their admiration for wealth, no matter how acquired, and in their spiritless way of killing their leisure time. The emancipation of their class appears to them only an empty dream; on the other hand, football, boxing, racing, betting are things which deeply excite them, and take up all their leisure, all their spiritual power, all their material resources.

In vain people seek by ethical sermons to arouse the English worker to a higher conception of the world, and to a sense of nobler pursuits. The ethics of the proletariat spring from its revolutionary aspirations; it is ennobled and strengthened by them. The idea of the revolution it is which has effected that marvellous rise of the proletariat from the depths of degradation, which forms the most magnificent result of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Let us, then, keep, first and foremost, to this revolutionary idealism. Then let come what may, we shall be equal to the most difficult and to the highest, and prove worthy of the great historical mission which is in store for us.