If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all?  Have we not seen the democratic form of government lend itself to ill-concealed plutocracy in Europe and America?  Why run at all the risk of corruption of the post-revolutionary government at the hands of the capitalists?  Why first admit the capitalists into the inner circle and then spend time and effort in preventing them from coming to the top?  Therefore, they declined parliamentarism with thanks and would accept nothing less than a government by the representative organ of the workers—­the Soviets.

If we are right in laying the emphasis on the relative fighting will and fighting strength of the classes struggling for power rather than on the doctrines which they preach and the methods, fair or foul, which they practice, then the American end of the problem, too, appears in a new light.  No longer is it in the main a matter of taking sides for or against the desirability of a Bolshevist rule or a dictatorship by the proletariat, but a matter of ascertaining the relative strength and probable behavior of the classes in a given society.  It is as futile to “see red” in America because of Bolshevism in Russia as to yearn for Bolshevism’s advent in the United States.  Either view misses the all-important point that so far as social structure is concerned America is the antipodes of Russia, where the capitalists have shown little fighting spirit, where the tillers of the soil are only first awakening to a conscious desire for private property and are willing to forego their natural share in government for a gift of land, and where the industrial proletariat is the only class ready and unafraid to fight.  Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor dictatorship declared, it could never “stay put.”  No one who knows the American business class will even dream that it would under any circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities.  A Bolshevist coup d’etat in America would mean a civil war to the bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private property.[110]

But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the United States is so decisively with private property that America is proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one.  Another and perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her four million organized trade unionists.  For, however unjustly they may feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both spiritual and material, are too big to