potency, that participation in them should be considered the means to a slow, step-by-step introduction of the proletariat to political power.
Social evolution does not, however, lead merely to the dissolution of the great united Parliamentary parties into countless, diverse and indeed often hostile factions. It leads also to the result that very often the Parliamentary majorities are more reactionary and more hostile than the government. Even if the governments are but agents of the ruling classes, still they have more insight into the sum of political and social relations, and, however willing a servant the official bureaucracy is to the government, it nevertheless develops its own life and its own tendencies that react upon the government. Moreover, the bureaucracy is recruited from the intellectuals, in which, as we have already seen, an understanding of the significance of the proletariat is advancing, even though timidly.
All this operates so that not seldom the government, with all its reactionary attitudes and hostility to labor, still does not proceed with such blind rage as does the ruling class, with its little bourgeois and agrarian tail, which stands behind the government. The Parliament which was formerly the means of pressing the government forward upon the road to progress becomes ever more and more the means to nullify the little progress that conditions compel the
