I. The Problem of the Moderates

In the summer of 1792 Lafayette, with some of his officers, left the French Army and passed over to the Austrian lines. He was promptly put in prison by the Austrians, to whom he was a dangerous firebrand of revolution. Lafayette was, however, a good deal more fortunate than many of his fellow-heroes of 1789 who elected to stay in France, and who were guillotined as dangerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionists. Fedor Linde, a moderate Socialist who in April, 1917, moved the Finnish Regiment to a mutinous demonstration against the pro-Ally and still more moderate Miliukov, was later sent to the front as a government commissar under Kerensky and there was lynched by mutinous soldiers who refused to obey his commands. In 1647 Denzil Holles, of whom we took note briefly back in 1629, as he was helping to hold down the Speaker in his chair, was with ten other Presbyterian members excluded from Parliament for “endeavoring to overthrow the rights and liberties of the subjects.” He did indeed return briefly to his seat again in 1648, but was soon forced to flee to France to save his life. A famous phrase from the French revolution puts the thing neatly: “The revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.”

The honeymoon was in these revolutions short; very soon after the old regime had fallen there began to be evident signs that the victors were not as unanimous about what was to be done to remake the country as had appeared in the first triumphant speeches and ceremonies. Those who had directly taken over the mechanism of government were in all four of our societies men of the kind usually called moderates. They represented the richer, better known and higher placed of the old opposition to the government, and it is only to be expected that they should take over from that government. Indeed, as we have seen, their assumption of responsibility is almost a spontaneous act. So strong is this feeling that the moderates should take over power that it prevailed even in Russia in February, 1917. It looks to us now as though a Socialist coalition of some kind—Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik groups, with possibly even Bolshevik adhesions—might just as well have assumed power right away in that month. The Kadets and other bourgeois groups clearly had few strong roots in the country. And yet Lvov and his well-meaning moderates had little difficulty in assuming at least nominal control.

The moderates, once in power, turned out to have less homogeneity and party discipline than they seemed to have when they were in opposition. They were faced with the difficult task of reforming existing institutions, or making a new constitution, and taking care at the same time of the ordinary work of governing. They were also confronted very soon with armed enemies, and found themselves engaged in a foreign or civil war, or in both together. They found against them an increasingly strong and intransigeant group of radicals and extremists who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime—indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels. After a period, brief in Russia, longer in France and England, there came a show of force between moderates and extremists, a show of force in many ways quite like that earlier one between the old government and the revolutionists, and the moderates were beaten. They fled into exile, they were put into prison ultimately to face the scaffold, guillotine, or firing-squad, or if they were lucky or obscure enough, they dropped out of sight and were forgotten. The extremists in their turn took power.

This process was not quite the same in the American revolution, where on the whole it may be said that extremists like the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks, did not attain undivided rule. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in America rather earlier in the revolutionary process a struggle between moderates and radicals had been fought out, and had ended with victory for the radicals. The fruit of that victory was the Declaration of Independence. We may say then that in all our revolutions there is a tendency for power to go from Right to Center to Left, from the conservatives of the old regime to the moderates to the radicals or extremists. As power moves along this line, it gets more and more concentrated, more and more narrows its base in the country and among the people, since at each important crisis the defeated group has to drop out of politics. To put it in another way: after each crisis the victors tend to split into a more conservative wing holding power and a more radical one in opposition. Up to a certain stage, each crisis sees the radical opposition triumphant. The details of this process vary naturally from revolution to revolution. Its stages are not identical in length or in their time-sequence. In America power never got as far Left as it did in the other countries.

Nevertheless this struggle between moderates and extremists is a stage in our revolutions as definite as those we have studied in previous chapters, and by its very existence provides us with a useful if somewhat simple uniformity. Before we attempt to make refinements in this observation, before we try to discern uniformities in the conduct of moderates and extremists, we must review briefly the course of events during the rule of the moderates.