ve capitalists are more and more
grateful for any outbreak that alarms or burdens the neutral classes and
serves as a useful pretext for that repression or reaction which their
interests require. Progressive capitalists, on the other hand, use the
very same disturbances to urge reforms they desire, on the ground that
such measures are necessary to avoid "revolution." The disturbance may
be as far as possible from revolutionary at bottom. It is only necessary
that it should be sufficiently novel and disagreeable to attract
attention and cause impatience and irritation among those who have to
pay for it. Like the British strikes of 1911, it may not cost the
capitalist class as a whole one-hundredth part of one per cent of its
income. And it might be possible to repress, within a short time and at
no greater expense, a movement many times more menacing. Provided it
serves to put the supporters of capitalism on their feet, whatever they
do as a result, whether in the way of repression or of reform, will be
but to carry out long-cherished plans for advancing their own interests,
plans that would have been the same even though there had been no shadow
of a "revolutionary" movement on the horizon. The only difference is
that such pseudo-revolutionary or semi-revolutionary disturbances serve
as stimuli to put the more inert of the capitalist forces in motion,
and, until the disturbances become truly menacing, strengthen the
capitalist position.

The use of revolutionary phrases does not then, of itself, demonstrate
an approach to the revolutionary position, though we may assume, on
other grounds, that the majority of the reformist Socialists, who take a
revolutionary position as regards certain _future_ contingencies, are in
earnest. But this indicates nothing as to the character of their
Socialism to-day. The important question is, how far their revolutionary
philosophy goes when directed, not at a hypothetical future situation
but to questions of the present moment.

In all the leading countries of the world, except Great Britain, the
majority of Socialists expect a revolutionary crisis in the future,
because they recognize, with that able student of the movement,
Professor Sombart, that "history knows of no case where a class has
freely given up the rights which it regarded as belonging to
itself."[189] This does not mean that Socialists suppose that all
progress must await a revolutionary period. Engels insisted that he an