disturbed? Can we admit, in the presence of these enormous figures at stake, that anyone would risk starting a war?"
Such simplicity of mind on the part of the bourgeois economists does not astonish us. In any case their interest lies in appearing so naive, and in talking seriously about peace in the presence of imperialism. But what remains of Kautsky's Marxism when, in 1914-15-16, he takes up the same attitude as the bourgeois reformists and affirms that "everybody is agreed" (imperialists, pseudo-Socialists, and social pacifists?) on peace? Instead of the analysis of imperialism and the demonstration of its deeply-rooted internal contradictions, we have nothing but the "innocent desire" of the reformist not to see these contradictions, and not to mention them at all.
Let us give a brief example of Kautsky's economic critique of imperialism. He takes the statistics of British export and import trade with Egypt for 1872 and 1912. This import and export trade has developed more slowly than that of England itself. And thereupon Kautsky concludes: "We have no reason to suppose that English trade with Egypt would have been less developed under the influence of pure economic factors, even without military occupation." And "the tendencies of capital to expansion can be best satisfied not by the violent methods of imperialism, but by peaceful democracy."95
This reasoning of Kautsky, which is repeated in every key by his Russian followers, constitutes the substance of his critique of imperialism, and that is why we must pause on it for a moment. Let us begin by referring to a passage by Hilfer-
