to claim that
the Socialists were _leading_ the non-Socialists in these matters.

In contrasting his section of the French Party with the German movement,
Jaures claimed that the French were both more revolutionary than the
German, and more practical in their efforts at immediate reform. "You,"
he said, speaking to the Germans, "have neither a revolutionary nor a
parliamentary activity." He reminded them that having never had a
revolution they could not have a revolutionary tradition, that universal
suffrage had been given to them from above (by Bismarck), instead of
having been conquered from below, that they had been forced tamely to
submit when they had recently been robbed of it in Saxony. "You continue
in this way too often," he continued, "to obscure and to weaken, in the
German working class, the force of a revolutionary tradition already
too weak through historic causes." And finally he asserted that the
German Socialists, who, a year or so before this conference, had
obtained the enormous number of 3,000,000 votes, had been able to do
nothing with them in the Reichstag. He said that this was due in part to
the character of the German movement, as shaped by the circumstances of
the past, and partly to the fact that the Reichstag was powerless in the
German government, and claimed that they would have been only too glad
to follow the French reformists' course, if they could have done so,
just as their only reason for not using revolutionary measures was also
that the German government was too strong for them.

"Then," concluded Jaures, "you do not know which road you will choose.
There was expected from you after this great victory a battle cry, a
program of action, a policy. You have explored, you have spied around,
watched events; the public's state of mind was not ripe. And then before
your own working class and before the international working class, you
masked the feebleness of your activity by taking refuge in extreme
theoretical formulas which your eminent comrade, Kautsky, will furnish
to you until the life goes out of him." As time has not yet tested
Jaures's accusations, they cannot yet be finally disproved or proved.
The replies of his revolutionary opponents at the Congress were chiefly
counter-accusations. But the later development of the German movement
gives, as I shall show, strong reasons why Jaures's criticisms should be
accepted as being true only of the reformist minority of the German
Party