Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/39

xxxii a split of the "socialist forces." Moreover, it must be admitted that some of them—as was glaringly shown by Auer's speech at the Paris International Congress—had very actually been "transformed"—backward—by the Millerand circumstance. In Belgium—as shown not less plainly by the speeches of Anseele and Furnémont—the same kind of "transformation" had taken place to a still greater extent. Visions of portfolios presented to socialists on a golden salver, bearing the inscription, Expédient Forcé, would by no means be idle dreams in that country, where an alliance with the "Liberal" bourgeoisie, if contracted for the temporary purpose of substituting equal suffrage for the present plural system, might be indefinitely continued for other objects, not less "necessary," and rendered every day more imperative by other circumstances, not less "exceptional"—as had already long been the case in France with the Waldeck-Millerand combination when the Congress met.

It falls under the sense that everywhere the wage-working, bona fide socialists were sorely perplexed. Unquestionably, the participation of a socialist in a bourgeois government was equally repugnant to their feelings and to their reason. But they were advised to keep cool, to be patient. This was only a French tempest that would soon blow over; a family quarrel that would terminate in a wonderful love-feast. From a German standpoint, for instance, Millerand might have acted too impulsively; but the matter was pressing, and while the divided organization of the French party afforded him no means of getting in time its collective permission "to save the republic," no doubt could be entertained that a vast majority of it sustained him. The Guesdists were right enough in "principle," but too stalwart in "tactics" on this "exceptional" occasion. They should not