decided from these
deliberations, as well as considerable actual experience, just what
forms of general strike are most promising and under what contingencies
each form is most appropriate. Henriette Roland-Holst has summed up the
whole discussion and its conclusions in an able monograph (indorsed by
Kautsky and others) from which I shall resume a few of the leading
points.[271] She concludes that railroad strikes for higher wages,
unless for some modest advance approved by a large part of the public,
like the recent British strike (which, in view of the rising cost of
living, was literally to maintain "a living wage"), can only lead to a
ferocious repression. For a nation-wide railroad strike is paid for by
the whole nation, and its benefits must be nation-wide if it is to
secure the support of that part of the public without which it is
foredoomed to failure. Otherwise, says Roland-Holst, "the greater has
been the success of the working people at the beginning, the greater has
been the terror of the middle classes," and as a consequence the
measures of repression in the end have been proportionately desperate.
But this applies only when such strikes are for aggressive ends, like
that of 1910 in France, and promise nothing to any element of society
except the employees immediately involved.

If a nation-wide railroad strike or a prolonged coal strike is
aggressive, it will inevitably be lost unless it has a definite public
object. And the only aggressive political aim that would justify, in the
minds of any but those immediately involved, all the suffering and
disorder a railroad strike of any duration would entail, would be a
social revolution to effect the capture of government and industry. The
only other circumstances in which such a strike might be employed with
that support of a part at least of the public which is essential to its
success would be as a last resort, when some great social injustice was
about to be perpetrated, like a declaration of war, or an effort to
destroy the Socialist Party or the labor unions. Jaures says rightly,
that even then it would be "a last and desperate means less suited to
save one's self than to injure the enemy."

These conclusions as to the possibilities and limitations of the general
strike are based on a careful study of the military and other powers of
the existing governments. "The power of the modern State," says
Roland-Holst, "is superior to that of the working class i