in the summer of 1905 had demanded that the government grant the demands of
the workers and so end the strikes, and who worked in unison with the
workers to secure the much-desired political freedom, six months later were
demanding that the government suppress the strikes and exert its force to
end disorder.

Recognition of these facts need not imply any lack of sympathy with the
proletariat in their demands. The class struggle in modern industrial
society is a fact, and there is abundant justification--the justification
of necessity and of achievement--for aggressive class consciousness and
class warfare. But it is quite obvious that there are times when class
interests and class warfare must be set aside in favor of larger social
interests. It is obviously dangerous and reactionary--and therefore
wrong--to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of
great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood
and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague.
Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which
has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this
important truth; he would never have supported class separatism under
conditions such as those prevailing in Russia at the end of 1905. Only
doctrinaires, slaves to formulæ, but blind to reality, could have
sanctioned such separatism. But doctrinaires always abound in times of
revolution.

By December the government was stronger than it had been at any time since
the Revolution began. The zemstvos were no longer an active part of the
revolutionary movement. Indeed, there had come over these bodies a great
change, and most of them were now dominated by relatively reactionary
landowners who, hitherto apathetic and indifferent, had been stirred to
defensive action by the aggressive class warfare of the workers.