on this lower middle class, which hopes to make use of the strength of the really proletarian organisations for its own great personal advantage.[1] The politicians believe that this class will always have peaceful tendencies, that it may be organised and disciplined, and that since the leaders of such sane syndicates understand equally with the politicians the action of the State, this class will form an excellent body of followers. They would like to make use of it to govern the proletariat; it is for this reason that Ferdinand Buisson and Jaurès are in favour of syndicates of the minor grades of civil servants, who, entering the Bourses du Travail, would inspire the proletariat with the idea of imitating their own feeble and peaceful attitude.
The political general strike concentrates the whole of this conception into one easily understood picture: it shows us how the State would lose nothing of its strength, how the transmission of power from one privileged class to another would take place, and how the mass of the producers would merely change masters. These new masters would very probably be less able than those of to-day; they would make more flowery speeches than the capitalists, but there is every evidence that they would be much harder and much more insolent than their predecessors.
The new school approaches the question from quite another point of view: it cannot accept the idea that the historical mission of the proletariat is to imitate the middle class; it cannot conceive that a revolution as vast as that which would abolish capitalism could be attempted for a trifling and doubtful result, for a change of masters, for the satisfaction of theorists, politicians,
- ↑ "A portion of the nation throwing in its lot with the proletariat to demand its just rights," says Maxime Leroy, in a book devoted to the defence of the syndicates o£ civil servants (Les Transformations de la puissance publique, p. 216).
