Impatience a few degrees less intense produced the next group, the partisans of pacific Socialist propaganda.  They maintained that there was no necessity for overthrowing the old order of things till the masses had been intellectually prepared for the new, and they objected to the foundation of the new regime being laid by despots, however well-intentioned in the Socialist sense.  The people must be made happy and preserved in a state of happiness by the people themselves.

In the last place came the least impatient of all, the Social Democrats, who differ widely from all the preceding categories.

All previous revolutionary groups had systematically rejected the idea of a gradual transition from the bourgeois to the Socialist regime.  They would not listen to any suggestion about a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic even as a mere intermediate stage of social development.  All such things, as part and parcel of the bourgeois system, were anathematised.  There must be no half-way houses between present misery and future happiness; for many weary travellers might be tempted to settle there in the desert, and fail to reach the promised land.  “Ever onward” should be the watchword, and no time should be wasted on the foolish struggles of political parties and the empty vanities of political life.

Not thus thought the Social Democrat.  He was much wiser in his generation.  Having seen how the attempts of the impatient groups had ended in disaster, and knowing that, if they had succeeded, the old effete despotism would probably have been replaced by a young, vigorous one more objectionable than its predecessor, he determined to try a more circuitous but surer road to the goal which the impatient people had in view.  In his opinion the distance from the present Russian regime protected by autocracy to the future Socialist paradise was far too great to be traversed in a single stage, and he knew of one or two comfortable rest-houses on the way.  First there was the rest-house of Constitutionalism, with parliamentary institutions.  For some years the bourgeoisie would doubtless have a parliamentary majority, but gradually, by persistent effort, the Fourth Estate would gain the upper hand, and then the Socialist millennium might be proclaimed.  Meanwhile, what had to be done was to gain the confidence of the masses, especially of the factory workers, who were more intelligent and less conservative than the peasantry, and to create powerful labour organisations as material for a future political party.

This programme implied, of course, a certain unity of action with the constitutionalists, from whom, as I have said, the revolutionists of the old school had stood sternly aloof.  There was now no question of a formal union, and certainly no idea of a “union of hearts,” because the Socialists knew that their ultimate aim would be strenuously opposed by the Liberals, and the Liberals knew that an attempt was being made to use them as a cat’s-paw; but there seemed to be no reason why they of the two groups should not observe towards each other a benevolent neutrality, and march side by side as far as the half-way house, where they could consider the conditions of the further advance.