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7. CHAPTER VII
BUREAUCRACY. CENTRALIZING AND DECENTRALIZING TENDENCIES

The organization of the state needs a numerous and complicated bureaucracy. This is an important factor in the complex of forces of which the politically dominant classes avail themselves to secure their domination and to enable themselves to keep their hands upon the rudder.

The instinct of self-preservation leads the modern state to assemble and to attach to itself the greatest possible number of interests. This need of the organism of the state increases pari passu with an increase among the multitude, of the conviction that the contemporary social order is defective and even irrational—in a word with the increase of what the authorities are accustomed to term discontent. The state best fulfils the need for securing a large number of defenders by constituting a numerous caste of officials, of persons directly dependent upon the state. This tendency is powerfully reinforced by the tendencies of modern political economy. On the one hand, from the side of the state, there is an enormous supply of official positions. On the other hand, among the citizens, there is an even more extensive demand. This demand is stimulated by the ever-increasing precariousness in the position of the middle classes (the smaller manufacturers and traders, independent artisans, farmers, etc.) since there have come into existence expropriative capitalism on the grand scale, on the one hand, and the organized working classes on the other—for both these movements, whether they wish it or not, combine to injure the middle classes. All those whose material existence is thus threatened by modern economic developments endeavour to find safe situations for their sons, to secure for these a social position which shall shelter them from the play of economic forces. Employment under the state, with the important right to a pension which attaches to such employment, seems created expressly for their needs. The immeasurable demand for situations which results from these conditions, a demand which is always greater than the supply, creates the so-called “intellectual proletariat.” The numbers of this body are subject to great fluctuations. From time to time the state, embarrassed by the increasing demand for positions in its service, is forced to open the sluices of its bureaucratic canals in order to admit thousands of new postulants and thus to transform these from dangerous adversaries into zealous defenders and partisans. There are two classes of intellectuals. One consists of those who have succeeded in securing a post at the manger of the state, whilst the other consists of those who, as Scipio Sighele puts it, have assaulted the fortress without being able to force their way in. [133] The former may be compared to an army of slaves who are always ready, in part from class egoism, in part for personal motives (the fear of losing their own situations), to undertake the defense of the state which provides them with bread. They do this whatever may be the question concerning which the state has been attacked and must therefore be regarded as the most faithful of its supporters. The latter, on the other hand, are sworn enemies of the state. They are those eternally restless spirits who lead the bourgeois opposition and in part also assume the leadership of the revolutionary parties of the proletariat. It is true that the state bureaucracy does not in general expand as rapidly as do the discontented elements of the middle class. None the less, the bureaucracy continually increases. It comes to assume the form of an endless screw. It grows ever less and less compatible with the general welfare. And yet this bureaucratic machinery remains essential. Through it alone can be satisfied the claim of the educated members of the population for secure positions. It is further a means of self-defense for the state. As the late Amilcare Puviani of the University of Perugia, the political economist to whom we are indebted for an important work upon the legend of the state, expresses it, the, mechanism of bureaucracy is the outcome of a protective reaction of a right of property whose legal basis is weak, and is an antidote to the awakening of the public conscience. [134]

The political party possesses many of these traits in common with the state. Thus the party in which the circle of the élite is unduly restricted, or in which, in other words, the oligarchy is composed of too small a number of individuals, runs the risk of being swept away by the masses in a moment of democratic effervescence. Hence the modern party, like the modern state, endeavours to give to its own organization the widest possible base, and to attach to itself in financial bonds the largest possible number of individuals. Thus arises the need for a strong bureaucracy, and these tendencies are reinforced by the increase in the tasks imposed by modern organization.

As the party bureaucracy increases, two elements which constitute the essential pillars of every socialist conception undergo an inevitable weakening: an understanding of the wider and more ideal cultural aims of socialism, and an understanding of the international multiplicity of its manifestations. Mechanism becomes an end in itself. The capacity for an accurate grasp of the peculiarities and the conditions of existence of the labour movement in other countries diminishes in proportion as the individual national organizations are fully developed. This is plain from a study of the mutual international criticisms of the socialist press. In the days of the so-called “socialism of the émigrés,” the socialists devoted themselves to an elevated policy of principles, inspired by the classical criteria of internationalism. Almost every one of them was, if the term may be used, a specialist in this more general and comprehensive domain. The whole course of their lives, the brisk exchange of ideas on unoccupied evenings, the continued rubbing of shoulders between men of the most different tongues, the enforced isolation from the bourgeois world of their respective countries, and the utter impossibility of any “practical” action, all contributed to this result. But in proportion as, in their own country, paths of activity were opened for the socialists, at first for agitation and soon afterwards for positive and constructive work, the more did a recognition of the demands of the everyday life of the party divert their attention from immortal principles. Their vision gained in precision but lost in extent. The more cotton-spinners, boot and shoe operatives, or brushmakers the labour leader could gain each month for his union, the better versed he was in the tedious subtleties of insurance against accident and illness, the greater the industry he could display in the specialized question of factory inspection and of arbitration in trade disputes, the better acquainted he might be with the system of checking the amount of individual purchases in cooperative stores and with the methods for the control of the consumption of municipal gas, the more difficult was it for him to retain a general interest in the labour movement, even in. the narrowest sense of this term. As the outcome of inevitable psychophysiological laws, he could find little time and was likely to have little inclination for the study of the great problems of the philosophy of history, and all the more falsified consequently would become his judgment of international questions. At the same time he would incline more and more to regard every one as an “incompetent,” an “outsider,” an “unprofessional,” who might wish to judge questions from some higher outlook than the purely technical; he would incline to deny the good sense and even the socialism of all who might desire to fight upon another ground and by other means than those familiar to him within his narrow sphere as a specialist. This tendency towards an exclusive and all-absorbing specialization, towards the renunciation of all farreaching outlooks, is a general characteristic of modern evolution. With the continuous increase in the acquirements of scientific research, the polyhistor is becoming extinct. His place is taken by the writer of monographs. The universal zoologist no longer exists, and we have instead ornithologists and entomologists; and indeed the last become further subdivided into lepidopterists, coleopterists, myrmecologists.

To the same of the “non-commissioned officers” who occupy the inferior grades of the party bureaucracy may be aptly applied what Alfred Weber said of bureaucracy in general at the congress of the Verein für Sozialpolitik held in Vienna in 1909. Bureaucracy is the sworn enemy of individual liberty, and of all bold initiative in matters of internal policy. The dependence upon superior authorities characteristic of the average employee suppresses individuality and gives to the society in which employees predominate a narrow petty-bourgeois and philistine stamp. The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty. In every bureaucracy we may observe place-hunting, a mania for promotion, and obsequiousness towards those upon whom promotion depends; there is arrogance towards inferiors and servility towards superiors. Wolfgang Heine, who in the German Socialist Party is one of the boldest defenders of the personal and intellectual liberty of the members, who is always in the breach to denounce “the tendency to bureaucracy and the suppression of individuality,” goes so far, in his struggle against the socialist bureaucracy, as to refer to the awful example of the Prussian state. It is true, he says, that Prussia is governed in accordance with homogeneous principles and by a bureaucracy which must be considered as a model of its kind; but it is no less true that the Prussian state, precisely because of its bureaucratic characteristics, and notwithstanding its external successes, is essentially retrogressive. If Prussia does produce any distinguished personalities, it is unable to tolerate their existence, so that Prussian politics tends more and more to degenerate into a spiritless and mechanical regime, displaying a lively hostility to all true progress. [135] We may even say that the more conspicuously a bureaucracy is distinguished by its zeal, by its sense of duty, and by its devotion, the more also will it show itself to be petty, narrow, rigid, and illiberal.

Like every centralizing system, bureaucracy finds its justification in the fact of experience that a certain administrative unity is essential to the rapid and efficient conduct of affairs. A great many functions, such as the carrying out of important statistical inquiries, can never be satisfactorily effected in a federal system.

The outward form of the dominion exercised by the leaders over the rank and file of the socialist party has undergone numerous changes pari passu with changes in the historical evolution of the labour movement.

In Germany, the authority of the leaders, in conformity with the characteristics of the nation and with the insufficient education of the masses, was at first displayed in a monarchical form; there was a dictatorship. The first labour organization on German soil was the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein of Ferdinand Lassalle. This organization was founded in 1873 and lasted until 1875, when it became fused with the internationalist and Marxist section of German socialism, the “Eisenachers.” The personal creation of a man of extraordinary force of character, it received even in its smallest details the stamp of his personality. It has been contended that Lassalle's association was founded upon the model of the Nationalverein, a German national league which was extremely influential at that epoch. This may be true in respect of the base of the Arbeiterverein, but is certainly not true of its summit. The Arbeiterverein, like the Nationalverein, was a unitary society whose members were dispersed throughout Germany and did not form any properly organized local branches. The membership was not local but national, each member being directly dependent upon the central organization. But whereas in the Nationalverein the central executive was a committee of several members, the Arbeiterverein was autocratically ruled by a single individual, Ferdinand Lassalle, who exercised, as did his successor Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, as president of the party of German workers, a power comparable with that of the doge of the Venetian Republic, and indeed a power even more unrestricted, since the president's power was not, as was that of the doge, subject to any kind of control through oligarchical institutions. The president was an absolute monarch, and at his own discretion nominated his subordinate officials, his plenipotentiaries, and even his successor. He commanded, and it was for the others to obey. This structure of the organization was not the outcome merely of the personal qualities of Lassalle, of his insatiable greed for power, and of that egocentric character which made him, despite his genius, so poor a judge of men; it corresponded also to his theoretical view of the aim of all party organization. In his famous speech at Ronsdorf he said: “Wherever I have been I have heard from the workers expressions of opinion which may be summarized as follows: 'We must forge our wills into a single hammer, and place this hammer in the hands of a man in whose intelligence, characters, and, good-will we have the necessary confidence, so that he can use this hammer to strike with!' . . . The two contrasts which our statesmen have hitherto believed incapable of being united, freedom and authority, whose union they have regarded as the philosopher's stone —these contrasts are most intimately united in our Verein, which thus represents in miniature the coming social order!” Thus in the eyes of the president his dictatorship was not simply a sad necessity temporarily forced upon a fighting organization, but dictatorship was the ultimate aim of the labour movement. In the days of Lassalle, the labour movement in Germany was still weak, and, like a little boy, was still urgently in need of paternal guidance. When the father came to die he made testamentary arrangements for the provision of a guardian (for the German labour movement could still be an object of testamentary depositions). After Lassalle's death, the decisive executive power, the quintessence (if the term be permitted) of the structure of the young labour movement, continued to rest at the most absolute disposal of a single individual, Schweitzer. This authoritative tendency was an outcome, not so much of the historical necessity of the moment, as of the traditions and of the racial peculiarities of the German stock. With the lapse of time this characteristic has been notably attentuated by theoretical and practical democracy, and by the varying necessities of the case; above all by the appearance of a typically southern socialism, less rigid than that of Prussia and of Saxony, and jealous of its own autonomy. But the tendency has not disappeared, nor can it disappear.

Whilst there was thus forming in Germany the massive organization of the followers of Lassalle, the leaders of the International Association adopted a different form of organization. The International Working-men's Association was characterized by mutual jealousy on the part of the various national sections, and this was a potent obstacle in the way of any tendency towards dictatorship. Thus there came into existence in London the General Council, the supreme authority of the International, consisting of a handful of members belonging to the different countries represented in the organization. But the powers of this executive were in many respects hardly less restricted than those of the president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein. The General Council forbade the associations which were affiliated to it to elect presidents, regarding this as contrary to democratic principles. Yet as far as concerned itself, it proudly asserted, through the mouth of the most conspicuous among its members, that the working class had now discovered a “common leadership.” [136] It nominated from among its own members the officers necessary for the general conduct of its business, such as the treasurer, the general secretary, and the corresponding secretaries for the different countries, nor did it hesitate on occasions, to allot several offices to the same individual. Engels, though a German, was for some time secretary for four different countries—Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Denmark. [137] It may be added that the secretariat carried with it important prerogatives, such as the right of recognizing newly constituted sections, the right to grant or refuse pecuniary subsidies, and the adjustment of disputes among the comrades. It is unquestionable that for several years the General Council was subject, in respect of all its most significant practical and theoretical manifestations, to the iron will of one single man, Karl Marx. The conflict in the General Council between the oligarchy de jure and the monarchy de facto was the inner cause of the rapid decline of the Old International. The General Council and especially Marx were accused of being the negation of socialism because, it was said, in their disastrous greed for power, they had introduced the principle of authority into the politics of the workers. [138] At first these accusations were directed from without, coming from the groups that were not represented on the General Council: the accusers were Bakunin, the Italians, and the Jurassians. The General Council, however, easily got the upper hand. At The Hague congress in 1872, the “authoritarians,” making use of means characteristic of their own tendencies (the hunting of votes, the calling of the congress in a town which was little accessible to some of the opponents and quite inaccessible to others), [139] obtained a complete victory over the anti-authoritarians. Before long, however, voices were raised within the Council itself to censure the spirit of the autocracy. Marx was abandoned by most of his old friends. The French Blanquists ostentatiously separated themselves from him when he had arbitrarily transferred the General Council to New York. The two influential leaders of the English trade unions who were members of the General Council, Odger and Lucraft, quarreled with Marx because they had not been consulted about the manifesto in favor of the Paris Commune to which their signatures were attached. The German refugees in England, Jung and Eccarius, declared that it was impossible to work with persons as dictatorial as Marx and Engels. Thus the oligarchs destroyed the larval monarchy.

In 1889 the so-called New International was founded. The socialists parties of the various countries agreed to undertake common deliberations, and to meet from time to time in congresses for this purpose. Therewith the “idea of internationalism” (to quote a phrase employed by Jaeckh) underwent a transformation. The Old International had worked along the lines of the greatest possible centralization of the international proletariat, “so that it might be possible, at any place at which the economic class-struggle became especially active, to throw there immediately into the scale the organized power of the working class.” [140] The New International, on the other hand, took the form of an extremely lax system, a union of elements which were strangers one to another; these elements were national organizations of a very rigid form, each confined within the limits of its own state. In other words, the New International is a confederation of autonomous states, and lacks any unitary and homogeneous organization. The Old International was an individual dictatorship, masquerading as an oligarchy. The New International may be compared to the old States General of the Netherlands; it is a federal republic, consisting of several independent oligarchies. The General Council of London was all-powerful. The modern Secretariat Socialiste International, whose seat is in Brussels, is nothing but an office for the exchange of letters, devoid of all authority. It is true that the international socialist congresses have sometimes furnished an opportunity for thoroughly self-conscious and vigourous national oligarchies to attempt usurpations in the international field. Thus, in particular, the German social democracy, when forced upon the defensive at the Stuttgart congress of 1907, endeavoured, and not without success, to impose upon other socialist parties its own particular tactics, the verbal revolutionarism which had originated in the peculiar conditions of Germany. [141] The international unification of tactics has always been limited by the varying needs of the different national oligarchies. In other words, whilst national supremacies are still possible in the contemporary socialist International, it is no longer possible for the socialist party of one country to exercise a true hegemony over the other national parties. The dread of being dominated increases in each national party in proportion as it becomes firmly established, consolidating its own existence and rendering itself independent of other socialist parties. International concentration is checked by the competition of the various national concentrations. Each national party stands on guard to prevent the others from extending their sphere of influence. 142 The result is that the international efficiency of the resolutions voted at the international congresses is almost insignificant. At the International Socialist Congress of Amsterdam, in 1904, the Belgian Anseele made it clear that he would not regard himself as bound by an international vote forbidding socialists to participate in bourgeois governments. [143] Thus, again, Vollmar, with the approval of the Germans, speaking at the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, repudiated any interference on the part of the French in the military policy of the German socialists, protesting in advance against any international resolution regulating the conduct of the socialists of all countries in case of war. [144] Considered from close at hand the international socialist congresses present an aspect similar to that of the minor German principalities of the eighteenth century, consisting of nobles, ecclesiastics, and a few burgomasters, assemblies whose chief preoccupation was to avoid yielding to the prince a jot of their “freedoms,” that is to say of their peculiar privileges. In just the same way, the various national socialist parties, in their international congresses, defend with the most jealous care all their prerogatives and their national particularism, being all determined to yield not an inch of ground in favor of His Majesty the International.

The national oligarchies are willing to recognize the authority of international resolutions only when by an appeal to the authority of the International they can quell a troublesome faction in their own party. Sometimes the leaders of the minority secure an international bull to authenticate the purity of their socialist sentiments as contrasted with the majority, whom they accuse of heresy. Sometimes, on the other hand, it is the leaders of the majority who endeavour, on the international field, to gain a victory over the leaders of the minority, whom they have been unable to subdue within the limits of their national organization. A typical example of the former case is furnished by the action of the Guesdist minority, at the congress of Amsterdam in 1904, which endeavoured to discredit in the opinion of the International the ideas of their great cousin Jaurès in matters of internal policy. The manœuver proved effective, for the Guesdists succeeded in attaching Jaures to their chariot, and in holding him prisoner within the serried ranks of the unified French party. An example of the second mode of action is afforded by the conduct of the Italian and German Socialist Parties in appealing to the decisions of the international congresses (Paris, 1889; Zurich, 1893; London, 1895) in order to get rid of their anti-parliamentary and anarchist factions.

Side by side with this international decentralization, we see to-day a vigourous national centralisation. Certain limitations, however, must be imposed on this generalization.

In the modern labour movement, within the limits of the national organizations, we see decentralizing as well as centralizing tendencies at work. The idea of decentralization makes continuous progress, together with a revolt against the supreme authority of the central executive. But it would be a serious error to imagine that such centrifugal movements are the outcome of the democratic tendencies of the masses, or that these are ripe for independence. Their causation is really of an opposite character. The decentralization is the work of a compact minority of leaders who, when forced to subordinate themselves in the central executive of the party as a whole, prefer to withdraw to their own local spheres of action (minor state, province, or commune). A group of leaders which finds itself in a minority has no love for strong national centralization. Being unable to rule the whole country, it prefers to rule at home, considering it better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Vollmar, for example, who in his own land possesses so great an influence that he has been called the uncrowned king of Bavaria, cannot consent to play second fiddle in the German national organization. He would rather be first in Munich than second in Berlin!

The rallying cry of the majority is centralization, while that of the minority is autonomy. Those of the minority, in order to gain their ends, are forced to carry on a struggle which often assumes the aspect of a genuine fight for liberty, and this is reflected in the terminology of the leaders, who declare themselves to be waging war against the new tyranny. When the leaders of the minority feel themselves exceptionally strong, they push their audacity to the point of attempting to deny the right to existence of the majority, as impersonated in the central executive. At the Italian Socialist Congress held at Imola in 1902, the leader of the Italian reformists, Filippo Turati, joined with his friends in putting forward a formal proposal to suppress the central executive. It was necessary, he said, to substitute for this obsolete, dictatorial, and decrepit institution the complete autonomy of the local organizations, or at least to replace it by a purely administrative and executive organism consisting of three specialist employees. He added that it was a form of jacobinism to wish to govern the whole party from above. The opponents of this democratic conception rejoined with an effective argument when they pointed out that if the central executive were abolished, the parliamentary deputies would remain the sole and uncontrolled masters of the party. Consequently, whenever it became necessary to take action upon some urgent question, when time was lacking to make a direct reference to the party as a whole, it would be the parliamentary group, deriving its authority not from the party but from the electorate, which would decide upon the line of conduct to be pursued. If we accept the hypothesis that a true democracy may exist within the party, the tendency to the subdivision of powers is unquestionably anti-democratic, while centralization is, on the other hand, the best way of giving incontestable validity to the will of the masses. From this point of view, Enrico Ferri was perfectly right when he told the reformists that the proposed abolition of the central executive would be equivalent to the suppression of the sovereignty of the members in general, since the executive is the legitimate expression of the mass-will, and derives its rights from the party congresses.

This decentralizing movement which manifests itself within the various national socialist parties does not conflict with the essential principle of oligarchy. The minority in opposition, which has been thus careful to withdraw itself from the control of the central executive, proceeds within its own sphere of dominion to constitute itself into a centralized power no less unrestricted than the one against which it has been fighting. Thus such movements as we have been considering represent no more than an attempt to effect a partition of authority, and to split up the great oligarchies into a number of smaller oligarchies. In France and in Italy every socialist deputy endeavours to become as independent as possible of the central executive of his party, making himself supreme in his local organization. A similar process may be observed in Germany, where the persistence of numerous petty states, mutually independent, and each governed by its own parliament, has hitherto prevented the constitutional and administrative unification of the party throughout the country, and has greatly favored decentralizing tendencies. In consequence of this state of affairs we find in Germany that all the parties in the separate states, from Bavaria to Hesse, desire autonomy, independence of the central executive in Berlin. But this does not prevent each one of them from exercising a centralized authority within its own domain.

The decentralizing currents in German Socialism, and more particularly those of the German south, are adverse to cen-tralization only as far as concerns the central executive of Berlin, whilst within their own spheres they resist federalism with the utmost emphasis. Their opposition to the centralization in Berlin takes the form of a desire in the local parties to retain financial independence of the central treasury. At the Schweinfurt congress in 1906, Ehrhart, socialist deputy to the Bavarian diet, said: “It comes to this, the central executive has the management of the money which goes to Berlin, but it is for us to decide how we shall spend the money which is kept here.” 145 Hugo Lindenmann of Würtemberg, one of the most ardent adversaries of the Prussianization of the party and an advocate of federalism has declared that it is undesirable to deplete the local finances of the South German states in favor of the central treasury in Berlin, where the executive is always inclined to a policy of hoarding money for its own sake.

The struggles within the modern democratic parties over this problem of centralization versus decentralization are of great scientific importance from several points of view. It would be wrong to deny that the advocates of both tendencies bring forward a notable array of theoretical considerations, and occasionally make valid appeals to moral conceptions. We have, however, to disabuse our minds of the idea that the struggle is really one for or against oligarchy, for or against popular sovereignty or the sovereignty of the party masses. The tendency to decentralization of the party rule, the opposition to international centralization (to the far-reaching authority of the international bureaux, committees, congresses), or to national centralization (to the authority of the party executives), has nothing to do with the desire for more individual liberty.

The democratic tendency may be justified by practical reasons, and in particular by differences in the economic or social situation of the working classes in the various districts, or by other local peculiarities. The tendencies to local, provincial, or regional autonomy are in fact the outcome of effective and ineradicable differences of environment. In Germany, the socialists of the south feel themselves to be divided as by an ocean from their comrades of the north. They claim the rights of selfgovernment and participation in government because they live in countries where parliamentarism already possesses a glorious history dating from more than a century back, whereas Prussia is still thoroughly imbued with the authoritarian and feudal spirit. They claim it also because in the south agriculture is carried on mainly under a system of petty proprietorship, whereas in the central and eastern provinces of Germany large landed estates predominate. The result is that class differences, with their consequent differences of mental outlook, are less conspicuous in the south than in the north, so that the opposition to the socialists is of a different character in the two regions. In the struggles between the northern and the southern leaders within the Socialist Party, struggles which are often lively and at times extremely violent, each section levels the same accusation against the other, declaring it to belong to a country in which civilization is comparatively backward and where theoretical conceptions are obsolete. The socialists of the north contend that those of the south are still living in a petty bourgeois, pacific, countrified environment, whereas they themselves, in the land of large-scale manufacture, represent the future. The men of the south proudly reply that it is they who live in conditions to which their comrades of the north have yet to attain, by abolishing the large landed estates and by suppressing the class of junkers.

Similar environmental differences divide the Italian socialists. Here also the socialists of the south demand complete autonomy, contending that the theoretical basis of socialism in the south is different from that in the north. They say that in the former kingdom of Naples the actual conditions of production and distribution are not such as to establish a sharp distinction between the two classes which according to classical socialism exist everywhere in strife. Consequently the introduction into this region of the Marxist revolutionary propaganda would marshal against socialism, not the great and medium landowners alone, but also the petty proprietors. Whilst the socialists of the plain of the Po fiercely oppose a duty upon grain because this would increase the cost of living for the labouring masses agglomerated in great cities, the socialists of the south have on several occasions declared in favor of the existing protectionist system, because its suppression would bring about a crisis in production in a region where proletarians and employers all alike live by agriculture. Again, in the north, where manufacturing industry is dominant, the socialists disapproved of the Tripolitan campaign, whereas in the south, where they are for the most part agriculturists, an enthusiastic sentiment in favor of territorial expansion prevailed. In addition to these reasons, which may be termed intrinsic because they derive from the objective differences between the north and the south, we find that an opposition between the socialists of the two areas arises from the attitude of the government in the respective regions. The Italian government is double-faced, being liberal in the north, but often very much the reverse in the south, for here it is largely in the hands of the local coteries which, in a region where the voters are scattered, become the sole arbiters in times of election. In the year 1902, when Giolitti was in power, this duplex attitude of the government gave rise to a serious difference within the Socialist Party, for the socialists of the north did not disguise their ardent desire to participate in government, while those of the south (although their tendencies were rather reformist than revolutionary) attacked the government fiercely.

Thus, as has been shown at length, the various tendencies towards decentralization which manifest themselves in almost all the national parties, while they suffice to prevent the formation of a single gigantic oligarchy, result merely in the creation of a number of smaller oligarchies, each of which is no less powerful within its own sphere. The dominance of oligarchy in party life remains unchallenged.