moments when public attention is being directed to other matters, is unwilling to be disturbed or thinks the affair too paltry to call for much attention or for it to be advisable to irritate the dangerous adversary afresh.
These are tactics calculated absolutely on the sum of human weakness, and their result is a mathematical certainty, unless the other side also learns how to fight poison gas with poison gas.
Weak natures have to be told that it is a case of “to be or not to be”.
Intimidation in workshops and factories, at meetings and mass demonstrations, is always accompanied by success so long as it is not met by an equally powerful force of intimidation.
Poverty, which overtook the workers sooner or later, drove them into the camp of Social Democracy.
Since on countless occasions the bourgeoisie, not only most stupidly but most immorally made common cause against the most legitimate of human demands, often without getting or expecting profit for them¬ selves thereby, workmen, even the most disciplined, were driven out of the Trades Union organization into politics.
By the time that I was twenty years old I had learned to distinguish between the Trades Union as an instrument for defending the social rights of the employee and for fighting for better living conditions for him, and the Union as a party instrument in the political class ware The fact that Social Democracy realized the immense importance of the Trades Union movement gave it the instrument and assured its success ; the bourgeoisie failed to realize it and so lost their political position. They thought that contemptuous refusal to let it develop logically would give it its quietus and would really force it into illogical paths. For it is absurd and also untrue that the Trades Union movement is essentially