labor desert the Liberals to join the Conservatives.
Land reform, taxation reform, the eight-hour day, are being carried out,
however. But when it comes to such matters as an extended suffrage, the
capitalists will balk. His conclusion is that if economic reforms are to
continue, if, for example, the unemployed are to be set to work by the
government, or if political reforms are to be resumed, the Labourites
have to free themselves from the tutelage of the Liberal Party. And if
they do this, they can play so effectively on capitalist fears as to
force an extension of the suffrage and even change the British
Parliament into a "tool for the dictatorship of the working class." As
in Germany, all political advance of value to labor must be obtained
through playing on capitalist fears--only in England the process may be
more gradual and results easier to obtain.

"Every extension of the suffrage to the working class must be fought for
to-day," says Kautsky, "and it is only thanks to the _fear_ of the
working class that it is not abolished where it exists." By a strange
coincidence Kautsky renewed the prediction that the capitalistic Radical
government of England would never extend the ballot except when forced
by Labor only a few days before Prime Minister Asquith officially,
without any special pressure from Labor, pledged it to equal and
universal (manhood) suffrage. The passage follows:--

"In England the suffrage is still limited to-day, and capitalistic
Radicalism, in spite of its fine phrases, has no idea of enlarging
it. The poorest part of the population is excluded from the ballot.
In all Great Britain (in 1906) only 16.64 per cent possessed,
against 22 per cent in Germany. If England had the German Reichstag
suffrage law, 9,600,000 would be enfranchised, instead of
7,300,000, _i.e._ 2,300,000 more."[171]

Kautsky's view that capitalists cannot bend a more or less democratic
government to their purposes and therefore will not institute such a
government, unless forced to do so, is undoubtedly based on German
conditions. He contends that the hope of the German bourgeois lies not
in democracy nor even in the Reichstag, but in the strength of Prussia,
which spells Absolutism and Militarism. He admits in one passage that
conditions may be different in the United States, England, and British
colonies, and under certain circumstances in France, but for the peoples
of eastern Europe