ho speak
constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they
say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests
of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in
all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial
labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory
population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know
that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they
are thinking of government by a factory population.

They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes,
they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated
society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal
landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social
Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That
may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for
exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate
models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the
middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent
social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat
the mistake.

The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are
the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They
become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and
represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then
there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with
contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in
which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life.

Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as
it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so
foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence,
that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes
catastrophes the method of change.

The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for
insurrections res