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At this Congress the reformists were divided into three groups, represented by Bissolati, Turati, and Modigliani. All agreed that it was necessary not only to vote for certain reforms to this the revolutionists are agreed but also at certain times to vote for the whole budget and to support the administration.
The reformist "leaders," Jaurès and Turati, do all that is possible to lead the Socialist Parties of the two countries in the opposite direction from that in which these organizations are going. But though these "leaders" are turned in the direction of class conciliation, they are constantly being dragged backwards in the direction of class war.
That is, the "reformist" Turati denied that there is anything Socialistic about Bissolati's "ultra-reformist" faction. To this Bissolati answered that compromise and the political collaboration of the working people with other classes, was not to be reserved, as Turati had said, for accidental and extraordinary cases, but was "the very essence of the reformist method."
TURATI, Selezione servile, in Critica Sociale, June 1, 1894. SERGI, Degenerazione umane, Milan, 1889. JACOBY, Etudes sur la sélection dans ses rapports avec l'hérédité chez l'homme, Paris, 1881, p. 606. LOMBROSO, L'uomo di genio, 6th edition, Turin, 1894, has developed and complemented this law. London.
Only if the revolutionaries continue to grow more powerful, until Turati is obliged still further to moderate his "reformist" principles and to abandon some of his tactics permanently, instead of saying, as he does now, that he lays them aside only temporarily, will there be any real unity in the Italian Socialist Party.
But in the face of all criticism Bissolati announced that he refused absolutely to pass over to the opposition to the ministry of Giolitti. Turati and his followers, now in control of the Party, might tolerate this position; the large and growing revolutionary minority would not.
In other words, as in France, the working people, especially those in the unions, will not tolerate a further advance in the reformist direction, but Turati and Bissolati, like Jaurès and Vandervelde are striving to compromise, just as far as they will be allowed to do so.
It did not even forbid occasional support, and it left full discretion in the hands of the same parliamentary group whose policy I have been recording. As a consequence the Italian Party at this juncture intentionally tolerated two contradictory policies. Turati declared: "We are in opposition unless in some exceptional case, in which some situation of extreme gravity might present itself."
The Socialists Turati and Treves, the latter the author of the famous phrase, "nessuno in trincee quest' inverno," who before Caporetto had criticised the war as aggressive, imperialist and unnecessary, said now that all Italians must unite and fight on to drive back the invader from Italian soil.
This could only mean that Socialist group in the Italian Parliament, like that of France, and even of Germany, would divide its votes on many vital matters, or at least that the minority would abstain from voting. Which could only mean that on many questions of the highest importance there was no longer one Socialist Party, but two. Turati himself wrote of the Modena Congress:
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