observation. Unfortunately our statistics are not gathered by the people who are to use them, and as they are necessarily not full and complete, they must be used with great care and discrimination. Of course wrong or unintelligent handling of statistics will not make them "prove" anything that they really do not prove, as Oppenheimer seems to think, but it will render them worthless.
Kautsky has proven that Bernstein's statistics do not prove his assertions. The reason for it is that Bernstein handles his statistics unintelligently. But even Kautsky's intelligent handling could not make them yield any great results because of the incompleteness of our statistics and of the lack of intelligence in their gathering. Hence the general dissatisfaction on both sides with statistics. We will, therefore, follow here the Marxian method of making only such facts the basis of our argument as require no statistical tables to prove them, but merely to illustrate them.
Before proceeding, however, to discuss these facts we want to call attention to some significant circumstances in connection with the Revisionist movement and its literature. First in point of time and importance is the tone of early Revisionist Marx-criticism. We have already called attention to the nihilistic character of this literature. Now we desire to add that this nihilism was a gradual growth and was forced on the revisionists by their own inability to solve the problems which confronted them. At its inception Revisionism was merely doubtful. Doubt is the leit-motif of Bernstein's first literary attempts at revision. In the second place is to be considered the inability of the old school Marxists to stem the flood of Revisionism, notwithstanding their great efforts. While the flood of Revisionism is now at a standstill, if not subsiding, this is not due to the efforts of the Marxian leaders on the theoretical field, but to its own practical barrenness. And yet, there was enough in what was written by Marxists to show the utter untenableness of the revisionists' position. Kautsky's book was a crushing blow to Bernstein's attempts at the-
