The democratic and bourgeois revolution, which originated in the great movement of France in 1789, has come about in different countries in the most different ways. The old feudal system has yielded in one case to force, in another to peaceful and slow evolution. The revolutionary bourgeoisie has at one place and time proceeded to brutal expropriation without compensation, at another to the buying out of feudal servitudes. No one can know in what way the capitalist servitude will be abolished. The essential thing is that the proletariat should be always ready for the most vigorous and effective action. It would be dangerous to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary events occasioned either by the resistance or by the criminal aggression of the privileged class. It would be fatal, trusting in the one word revolution, to neglect the great forces which the conscious, organized proletariat can employ within democracy. These legal means, often won by revolution, represent an accumulation of revolutionary force, a revolutionary capital, of which it would be madness not to take advantage. Too often the workers neglect to profit by the means of action which democracy and the Republic put into their hands. They do not demand from trade-unionist action, co-operative action, or universal suffrage, all that those forms of action can give. No formula, no machinery, can enable the working-class to dispense with the constant effort of organization and education. The idea of the general strike, of general strikes, is invincibly suggested to proletarians by the growing magnitude of working-class organization. They do not desire violence, which is very often the result of an insufficient organization and a rudimentary education of the proletariat; but they would make a great mistake if they did not employ the powerful means of action, which co-ordinates working-class forces to subserve the great interests of the workers or of society; they must group and organize themselves to be in a position to make the privileged class more and more emphatically aware of the gulf which may suddenly be cleft open in the economic life of societies by the abrupt stoppage of the worn-out and interminably exploited workers. They can thereby snatch from the selfishness of the privileged class great reforms interesting the working-class in general, and hasten the complete transformation of an unjust society. But the formula of the general strike, like the partial strike, like political action, is only valuable through the progress of the education, the thought, and the will of the working-class. The Socialist party defends the Republic as a necessary means of liberation and education. Socialism is essentially republican. It might be even said to be the Republic itself, since it is the extension of the Republic to the régime of property and labor.