me outward obeisance to monarchy, but really because
such an action would split the Socialist Party and perhaps, also,
because he might not be able altogether to support Giolitti on the one
ground of the military elements of his budget. Far from condemning
Bissolati, the group of Socialist deputies passed a resolution that
expressed satisfaction with his conduct and even appointed him to speak
in their name at the opening of the new Parliament. All the deputies
save two then voted confidence in the new ministry and approbation of
its program.

The opinion of the revolutionary majority of the international movement
on this situation was reflected in the position of the revolutionaries
of the two chief cities of the country, Milan and Rome. At the former
city where they had a third of the delegates to the local Socialist
committee they moved that the Socialist Party could neither authorize
its deputies to represent it in a capitalist ministry or give that
ministry its support, "except under conditions determined, not by
Parliamentary artifices, but by the needs and mature political
consciousness of the great mass of workers." At Rome two thirds of the
Socialist delegates voted a resolution condemning the action of
Bissolati as "the direct and logical consequence of the thought,
program, and practical action of the reformist group," and reproved both
the proposal of immediate participation in a capitalist government and
"the theoretical encouragement of such a possibility" as being opposed
to all sound and consistent Socialist activity.

The "reformists," led by Turati, were of the opinion merely that the
time was not yet ripe for the action Bissolati had contemplated. But the
grounds given in the resolution proposed by Turati on this occasion show
that it was not on principle that he went even this far. He declared
that "in the present condition of the organization and the present state
of mind of the Party" a participation in the government which was "not
imposed by a real popular movement, would profoundly weaken Socialist
action, aggravating the already existing lack of harmony between purely
parliamentary action and the development of the political consciousness
and the capacity for victory on the part of the great mass of the
workers."[103] In other words, as in France, the working people,
especially those in the unions, will not tolerate a further advance in
the reformist direction, but Turati and Bissolati, like J