.

Jaures referred to the British unionists as an example of the success of
reformist tactics. Bebel was able to dispose of this argument. "The
capitalists of England are the most able in the world," he said. "If
next year at the general elections English Liberalism is victorious, it
will again make one of you, perhaps John Burns, an Under Secretary of
State, not to take an advance towards Socialism, but to be able to say
to the working people that it gives them voluntarily what has been
refused after a struggle on the Continent, in order to keep the votes of
the workers." (This is just what happened.)

"Socialism," he concluded, "cannot accept a share of power; it is
obliged to wait for all of the power."

The Amsterdam resolution, passed by a large majority after this debate,
was almost identical with that which had been adopted by a vote of 288
to 11 at the German Congress at Dresden in the previous year (1903),
and although the Austrian delegates and others, nearly half the total,
had expressed a preference for a substitute of a more moderate
character, they did not hesitate, when this motion was defeated, to
indorse the more radical one that was finally adopted. And in 1909, when
this Dresden (or Amsterdam) resolution came up for discussion at the
German Congress of Leipzig, it was unanimously reaffirmed. Those
opposing it did not dare to dispute it at all in principle, but merely
expressed the mental reservation that it was qualified by another
resolution adopted at a recent Congress which had declared that the
party should be absolutely free to decide the question of _temporary_
political alliances in _elections_. As such electoral combinations,
valid only for the _second ballot_, and lapsing immediately after the
elections, had always been common, the Dresden resolution was never
meant by the majority of those voting for it to forbid them. Its purpose
was only to insist that the object of the Socialists must always be
social revolution and not reform, since, to use its own words, supreme
political power "cannot be obtained step by step."

"The Congress condemns most emphatically," the Dresden resolution
declared, "the revisionist attempt to alter our hitherto victorious
policy, a policy based upon the class struggle; just as in the past _we
shall go on achieving power by conquering our enemies, not by
compromising with the existing order of things_." (My italics.) In a
recent letter widely quoted by the cont