Page:The Red Dawn (George).pdf/8

6 should be enlarged to the same degree as the existing parliaments of western Europe, with the cabinet under its control, etc. None of the bourgeois group were for a democratic republic before the momentous days of March, 1917. The Cadets had no common interest with the labor groups, that follow, except that they also demanded a Constitutional Assembly to draft a new constitution, the October manifesto, in their opinion, being, in a legal sense, unsatisfactory for such constitution.

As, in the making of history, only the socialistic labor groups have had any meaning in Russia, there is to be considered what differences there were in their programs and what they had in common. The last comes first. All the Russian socialist and labor parties and their many factions were for: (1), a republic, (2), a constitutional convention based upon universal, equal and direct suffrage, (3), democratic parliament based upon same and controlling the cabinet with corresponding reforms in all administrative and judicial affairs, (4), land reforms in favor of turning over the un-cultivated and excess land to the peasantry—the ownership to be regulated in different ways as given in the various programs, (5), extensive factory and social legislative reforms—a la Germany—and, (6), reforms in the system of education, etc.

And now in regard to the differences. The most moderate and loosely organized of the three great labor parties of Russia,—in its age the youngest of them—the Trudoviki (Labor Group), clung in a general way to the aforementioned points of the general socialist program, having no strongly marked characteristics of its own, except that it was, in the main, representative of the peasantry and the "socialistically inclined" layers of the people.

The chief characteristic of one of the remaining