A large question mark can be placed against the revolutionary inclination of Western socialism after 1900, and contemporaries and historians have not neglected to do this. Certainly when seen in retrospect, the so-called emancipation of the working class proved in practice to amount to nothing more than a gradual integration into capitalist society. And thanks to this development the rudiments of an essentially nineteenth-century revolutionary tradition were slowly but surely eroded. Thus everything to do with making a revolution seemed to belong to the romanticism and rhetoric of socialism. However, such an interpretation does too little justice to the importance of social protest as a permanent theme in the history of Western Europe, which has simply never experienced a harmoniously integrated society. Movements like socialism, which set themselves up as spokesmen and representatives of resistance to the existing order, were then seldom or never capable of a complete revolutionary destruction of it. Thus they were confronted with the problem of having to canalise this social and political dissatisfaction. The leadership could not let itself at the slightest provocation become involved in one kind of adventure or another. The moment for a meeting, a demonstration, a strike or an uprising had to be carefully chosen. On the other hand, the leadership had to give due consideration to the emotions which dominated the lowest regions of its own movement. The members could after all leave the organisation en masse because it no longer represented their current interests.