the nation. But if they are a respectably numerous minority of cities and villages scattered over the country, starting life on their own new Socialist lines, they will be able to win the right to pursue their own course. In all probability they will draw towards them a notable portion of the land, as was the case in France in 1793–94.
As to the Government, whether it be constituted by force only or by election; be it "the dictatorship of the proletariate," as they used to say in France in the "forties," and as they still say in Germany, or else an elected "Provisional Government," or a "Convention"; we put no faith in it. We know beforehand that it will be able to do nothing to accomplish the revolution, so long as the people themselves do not accomplish the change by working out on the spot the necessary new institutions.
We say so, not because we have a personal dislike of Governments, but because the whole of history shows us that men thrown into a Government by a revolutionary wave have never been able to accomplish what was expected from them. And this is unavoidable. Because in the task of reconstructing society on new principles, separate men, however intelligent and devoted they may be, are sure to fail. The collective spirit of the masses is necessary for this purpose. Isolated men can sometimes find the legal expression to sum up the destruction of old social forms—when the destruction is already proceeding. At the utmost, they may widen, perhaps, the sphere of the reconstructive work, extending what is being done in a part of the country, over a larger part of the territory. But to impose the reconstruction by law is absolutely impossible, as was proved, among other examples, by the whole history of the French Revolution. Many thousands of the laws passed by the revolutionary Convention had not even been put into force when reaction came and flung those laws into the waste-paper basket.
During a revolution new forms of life will always germinate on the ruins of the old forms, but no Government will ever be able to find their expression so long as these forms will not have taken a definite shape during the work itself of reconstruction which must be going on in thousands of spots at the same time. Who guessed—who, in fact, could have guessed—before 1789 the role going to be played by the Municipalities and the Commune of Paris in the revolutionary events of 1789–1793? It is impossible to legislate for the future. All
