n, as Plechanoff
said, either to serve the bourgeois politicians or to resort to the
tactics of Ravachol, Henry, Vaillant, and Most. The latter is the more
likely, since the masses refuse to be drawn into the general strike as
they formerly declined to participate in artificial uprisings.[AE] The
daring conscious minority more and more despair, and they turn to the
only other weapon in their arsenal, that of sabotage. There is a kind of
fatality which overtakes the revolutionist who insists upon an
immediate, universal, and violent revolution. He must first despair of
the majority. He then loses confidence even in the enlightened minority.
And, in the end, like the Bakouninist, he is driven to individual acts
of despair. What will doubtless happen at no distant date in France and
Italy will be a repetition of the congress at The Hague. When the
trade-union movement actually develops into a powerful organization, it
will be forced to throw off this incubus of the new anarchism. It is
already thought that a majority of the French trade unionists oppose the
anarchist tendencies of the clique in control, and certainly a number of
the largest and most influential unions frankly class themselves as
reformist syndicalists, in order to distinguish themselves from the
revolutionary syndicalists. What will come of this division time only
can tell.

In any case, it is becoming clear even to the French unionists that
direct action is not and cannot be, as Guesde has pointed out,
revolutionary action. It cannot transform our social system. It is
destined to failure just as insurrection as a policy was destined to
failure. Rittinghausen said at Basel in 1869: "Revolution, as a matter
of fact, accomplishes nothing. If you are not able to formulate, after
the revolution, by legislation, your legitimate demands, the revolution
will perish miserably."[50] This was true in 1848, in 1871, and even in
the great French Revolution itself. Nothing would have seemed easier at
the time of the French Revolution than for the peasants to have directly
possessed themselves of the land. They were using it. Their houses were
planted in the midst of it. Their landlords in many cases had fled. Yet
Kropotkin, in his story of "The Great French Revolution," relates that
the redistribution of land awaited the action of Parliament. To be sure,
some of the peasants had taken the land, but they were not at all sure
that it might not again be taken from them by