The moderates, then, do not really believe in the big words they have to use. They do not really believe a heavenly perfection is suddenly coming to men on earth. They are all for compromise, common sense, toleration, comfort. In a normal society, these desires are part of their strength and give them their hold over their fellows, who share at least their desire for comfort. But in these three revolutions large numbers of men were for the moment lifted by desire and emotion to a point where they seemed to despise even comfort. The moderates could not deal politically with such men; they could not take the first steps which are necessary if such men are to be understood. The moderates were cut off from the immoderates by a gap neither philosophy nor common sense could fill. There is an adage that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In one of his subtler short stories, _The Kingdom of the Blind_, Mr. H. G. Wells has exposed the weakness of this apothegm. In the heat of a violent revolution, its weakness is perhaps even more apparent than in the imaginary Andean valley of Mr. Wells’s tale. The moderates we have been dealing with were all very human and very fallible; but even had they been as wise as the heroes of Plutarch, as wise as Washington, it would seem that they must have failed. For we are here in a land fabulous, but real, where the wisdom and common sense of the moderate are not wisdom and common sense, but folly.
_Chapter_ SIX THE ACCESSION OF THE EXTREMISTS
_I. The_ Coup d’état
The struggle between the moderates and the extremists, which begins almost as soon as the dramatic overthrow of the old regime is effected, is marked by a series of exciting episodes: here street-fighting, there a forced seizure of property, almost everywhere heated debates, attempted repressions, a steady stream of violent propaganda. Tempers are strained to the breaking point over matters that in a stable society are capable of an almost automatic solution. There is an almost universal state of tension. The fever is working its way to a crisis. As with many fevers, its progress is in detail jerky, with now an apparent improvement and then a sudden jump ahead. But the cumulative effect is unmistakable. With the final overthrow of the moderates the revolution may be said to have entered its crisis stage.
Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates: the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak, the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an analysis of extremist strengths.
The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal government and turn it in a decisive _coup d’état_ against the legal government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them the control of the organizations which they had turned against the government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their monopoly of these organizations--New Model Army and Independent churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.
They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts, any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline, single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government. The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and the _lettres de cachet_ were real enough, even if they rarely fell to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia, its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization, plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.
What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent and perhaps most important variable of all--the quality of the human material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not. That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group, cannot measure exactly why _these_ revolutionists succeeded and others failed.
_II. Organization of the Extremists_
The first thing likely to strike an observer of the successful extremists in the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and indeed, the not quite so radical patriots who put through the American revolution, is their fewness in numbers. The membership of the formal organizations which did the work of beating the moderates was never more than a small minority of the total population. Their active membership was of course always smaller than the membership on the books. It is not easy to get exact figures, whether for membership or for populations, but the following figures are not erroneous enough to be misleading. The New Model Army was created at a membership of 22,000, and was not more than 40,000 in its most obstreperous days. The population of England was somewhere between three and five millions. The Jacobins at the most generous estimate numbered in their struggle with the moderates about 500,000. The population of France was probably over rather than under twenty millions. The Communist party in Russia has always prided itself on its numerical smallness; this is no unwieldy bourgeois party, full of indifferent members who cast a lazy vote, or don’t even vote at all. Figures again are uncertain, but it seems likely that at no time during the revolution did the Communist party number even 1 per cent of a population of well over one hundred million. In America the difficulty of even approximate figures is greater, since the patriots were not organized into a single body. It is clearly not fair to take the relatively small continental armies as exactly measuring the strength of the patriot--or Whig--group. Nevertheless, the best authorities are agreed that if you count out avowed Tories and the very numerous indifferent or neutral, the group which actively engineered, supported, and fought the American revolution is a minority, probably not more than 10 per cent of the population.
It is easy to remark that though the facts clearly show that these revolutionary groups are very small minorities indeed, all politically active groups are minorities, and that in these revolutions the radicals in some way “represented” or “carried out” what the soul, will, genius, of their nations demanded. This may well be so in terms familiar to the metaphysician, but the relation involved is one which at present we cannot pretend to be able to study by the methods we have laid down in this book. Perhaps the Jacobins were the agents of the general will of the French people; but the general will is a metaphysical concept the relation of which with tangible Jacobins we cannot possibly measure here.
Trotsky in one of his less realistic moods has a fine time reconciling the fewness of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with the largeness of Russia, and with the various groups clearly hostile to the Bolsheviks. “The Bolsheviks,” he writes, “took the people as preceding history had created them, and as they were called to achieve the Revolution. The Bolsheviks saw it as their mission to stand at the head of this people. _Those against the insurrection were ‘everybody’--except the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were the people._” Here again “everybody” in quotation marks is obviously different from everybody without quotation marks; and though we can as scientists, perhaps, make use of everybody, we can do nothing at all with “everybody.”