d
his associates were profiting more by lawful than by unlawful and
revolutionary action. It means that Socialists do not believe that the
capitalists will allow such action to remain lawful long enough
materially to increase the income of the working class and its economic
and political power as compared with their own.

Jaures's position as to present politics is based on the very opposite
view. "You will have to lead millions of men to the borders of an
impassable gulf," he says to the revolutionists, "but the gulf will not
be easier for the millions of men to pass over than it was for a hundred
thousand. What we wish is to try to diminish the width of the gulf which
separates the exploited in present-day society from their situation in
the new society."[190] The revolutionaries assert, on the contrary, that
nothing Socialists can do at the present time can moderate the class
war, or lessen the power of capitalism to maintain and increase the
distance between itself and the masses. In direct disagreement with
Jaures, they say that when a sufficient numerical majority has been
acquired, especially in this day when the masses are educated, it will
be able to overcome any obstacle whatever, even what Jaures calls the
impassable gulf--whether in the meanwhile that gulf will have become
narrower or wider than it is to-day, and they believe that the day of
this triumph would be delayed rather than brought nearer if the workers
were to divert their energies from revolutionary propaganda and
organization, to political trading in the interest of reforms that bring
no greater gains to the workers than to their exploiters. The
revolutionary majority believes that the best that can be done at
present is for the workers to train and organize themselves, and always
to devise and study and prepare the means by which capitalism can be
most successfully and economically assaulted when sufficient numbers are
once aroused for successful revolt.

When revolutionary Socialism is not pure speculation, it takes the form
of the present-day "class struggle" against capitalism. The view that
existing society can be _gradually_ transformed into a social democratic
one, Kautsky believes to be merely an inheritance of the past, of a
period "when it was generally believed that further development would
take place exclusively on the _economic_ field, without the necessity of
any kind of change in the relative distribution of _political_
institut