e." This reminds one very much of the notorious division into active
and passive citizens at the early stages of the French Revolution, which
gave such a splendid opportunity to the Jacobines to organize a revolt
of the passive citizens and was one of the chief causes leading up to
the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic reaction that followed. The
Washington plan, however, has been a complete failure. It has had no
imitators in the Socialist movement, nor is it likely to have.

On the other hand, the most influential representatives of the extreme
revolutionary wing of the movement, like Herve in France, have
championed the non-wage-earning elements of the movement as fearlessly
as the reformists.

"In the ranks of our party," writes Herve, "are to be found small
merchants, small employers, wretched, impoverished, educated
people, small peasant proprietors, none of whom on account of
occupation can enter into the general Federation of Labor, which
only admits those receiving wages and salaries. These are
revolutionary elements which cannot be neglected; these volunteers
of the Revolution who have often a beautiful revolutionary
temperament would be lost for the Revolution if our political
organization was not at hand to nourish their activity. Besides,
the General Federation of Labor is a somewhat heavy mass; it will
become more and more heavy as it comprises the majority of the
_working class which is by nature rather pacific at the bottom_."

While there is no sufficient reason for the accusation that the
Socialist movement neglects the brain workers of the salaried and
professional classes, there is somewhat more solid ground, in spite of
the above quoted declarations of Liebknecht and Herve, for the
accusation that it antagonizes those sections of the middle classes
which are, even to a slight degree, small capitalists, as, for example,
especially the farmers.

"The unimaginative person," says Mr. H. G. Wells, "who owns some little
bit of property, an acre or so of freehold land, or a hundred pounds in
the savings bank, will no doubt be the most tenacious passive resister
to Socialist ideas; and such I fear we must reckon, together with the
insensitive rich, as our irreconcilable enemies, as irremovable pillars
of the present order."[221]

This view is widespread among Socialists, and is even sustained by
Kautsky. "Small merchants and innkeepers,"