Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL AWAKENING OF SOCIALISM—THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTION From the point of view of our inquiry the most significant event in the history of Socialism is its entrance into politics. This endows the workingman with a new power and a great power; a power that will bring him farther on his way toward the goal he seeks than any other he possesses. Because the modern state is democratic, and the democratic state bends in the direction of the mass. The revolutions attempted in the middle of the last century are child's play compared with the changes that can be wrought when constitutions and courts, parliaments and administrative systems, become the instruments of a determined, self-possessed, and united political consciousness. Scarcely half a century elapsed between the French utopians and the time when the proletarians organized actual political parties, and arrayed themselves against the older orders in the struggle for political privilege. In the interval, revolution had its brief hour, and reaction its days of waiting. The French Revolution was a necessary preliminary to the proletarian movement. It was the most powerful instrument for the propagation of those democratic ideas that were so attractively clothed by Rousseau and so terribly distorted by the revolutionists. While this revolution was a bourgeois movement, not a proletarian uprising, not a revolution in the sense that Marx, for instance, uses the word, it must not be forgotten that the proletarians were in the revolution The dark and sullen background of that tragedy was the mass of unspeakably poor. They were not machine workers whose abjectness came from factory conditions, like the workmen of England a few decades later. They were proletarians without a class consciousness, but with a clas...