specimens of this type. In old Europe it became just a prehistoric figure.
It is but natural that intellectually gifted men among industrial wage-eamers
are looking to obtain a compensation for that lost paradise of their
dreams. There are plenty of working-men who feel with real bitterness
that their intellectual gifts are slowly spoilt and laid under an arrest
by more or less idiotic and boring manual work, without any hope of escape
or of the attainment of a better standard of living. All these elements
consider party organisation with its places and its careers as a very anchor
of salvation, especially in countries where the political bodies of the work
ing class, the social democratic parties, are well developed, as in
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and to a less extent, in France and
Italy (and, as recently appears, in England) and where the concurrence
in leadership by men of the educated class, which invades all party
life, is not too heavy. It is rather difficult to tell how many prole
tarians are entered as employees in party movements. In the socialist,
the radical, and the catholic parties of the continent their number will not
be easy to count. Everywhere ex-workmen contend for the greatest honours
and the most eminent places in party life with the bourgeois-born lawyers
and professors. As union officers they dominate the field without competi
tion. All these men have definitely left their original class, and enjoy
social and economic conditions which resemble very closely these of the
middle class people. They are self-made men in politics.
It may be objected that it constitutes no factor of selection that many of
the best elements of the lower classes, attracted by party organisation and
the machinery of trades unionism, abandon their original class, in order to
be entrusted by the crowd with the business of leadership ; that it is a
social evil, in the first place, because the socialist and trades union
leader accomplishes, as a rule (as we might say according to the
conservatives), a function of intellectual distress and social perniciousness ;
in the second place, because in that way the working class loses its
best men, and industry is deprived of its most intelligent hands. We
may answer these objections by stating that, first of all, whatever be the
number of party and trades union leaders, this number cannot be so high
as to seriously weaken the elite of working-men who pass their whole life
in the machinery halls. On the other hand it seems to us sure that
the activity is dedicated by the labour leaders, in a very high degree,
to an aim of social selection. Certainly socialism and trades unionism are
traced on lines which may be considered as an immense self-defence of the
weak against the strong. But the thorough amelioration of the general
condition of labour does not in any way mean, nor lead to, the artificial
protection of the inferiors against the superiors. To-day the terms inferior
and superior have acquired a mere economic character. The actual basis of
the struggle for life consists in the conjunction of intellectual and physical
gifts with the casual fact of birth, that is to say, a definite economical
23 ^Section III. R. Michels.
