the political balance, but becomes the decisive force in times of
agitation, ought to be so fully enlightened as to the aims and the
essential ideas of our party, that it would cease to fear us and
can be no longer used as a weapon against us."[217] (My italics.)

Karl Kautsky, though he takes a less broad view, also says that the
Socialist Party is "the only anti-capitalist party,"[218] and contends
in his recent pamphlet, "The Road to Power," that its recruiting ground
in Germany includes three fourths of the nation, and probably even more,
which (even in Germany) would include a considerable part of those
ordinarily listed with the middle class.

Kautsky's is probably the prevailing opinion among German Socialists.
Let us see how he proposes to compose a Socialist majority. Of course
his first reliance is on the manual laborers, skilled and unskilled.
Next come the professional classes, the salaried corporation employees,
and a large part of the office workers, which together constitute what
Kautsky and the other Continental Socialists call the _new_ middle
class. "Among these," Kautsky says, "a continually increasing sympathy
for the proletariat is evident, because they have no special class
interest, and owing to their professional, scientific point of view, are
easiest won for our party through scientific considerations. The
theoretical bankruptcy of bourgeois economics, and the theoretical
superiority of Socialism, must become clear to them. Through their
training, also, they must discover that the other social classes
continuously strive to debase art and science. Many others are impressed
by the fact of the irresistible advance of the Social Democracy. So it
is that friendship for labor becomes popular among the cultured classes,
until there is scarcely a parlor in which one does not stumble over one
or more 'Socialists.'"

It is difficult to understand how it can be said that these classes have
no special "class interest," unless it is meant that their interest is
neither that of the capitalists nor precisely that of the industrial
wage-earning class. And this, indeed, is Kautsky's meaning, for he seems
to minimize their value to the Socialists, because _as a class_ they
cannot be relied upon.

"Heretofore, as long as Socialism was branded among all cultured
classes as criminal or insane, capitalist elements could be brought
into the Socialist movement only by a comple