10.  The right of all persons to prosecute officials before a jury.

    11.  Election of magistrates.

    12.  A citizen army instead of ordinary troops.

    13.  Separation of Church from state and school from Church.

    14.  Free compulsory education for both sexes to the age of
    sixteen.

    15.  State feeding of poor children.

    16.  Confiscation of Church property, also that of the royal
    family.

    17.  Progressive income tax.

    18.  An eight-hour day, with six hours for all under eighteen.

    19.  Prohibition of female labor where such is harmful to women.

    20.  A clear holiday once a week to consist of forty-two hours on
    end.

It would be a mistake to suppose that this very moderate program embraced all that the majority of the Social Democratic party aimed at.  It was not intended to be more than an ameliorative program for immediate adoption by the Constituent Assembly, for the convocation of which the Social Democrats were most eager, and which they confidently believed would have a majority of Socialists of different factions.

In a brilliant and caustic criticism of conditions as they existed in the pre-Bolshevist period, Trotzky denounced what he called “the farce of dual authority.”  In a characteristically clever and biting phrase, he described it as “The epoch of Dual Impotence, the government not able, and the Soviet not daring,” and predicted its culmination in a “crisis of unheard-of severity."[5] There was more than a little truth in the scornful phrase.  On the one hand, there was the Provisional Government, to which the Soviet had given its consent and its allegiance, trying to discharge the functions of government.  On the other hand, there was the Soviet itself, claiming the right to control the course of the Provisional Government and indulging in systematic criticism of the latter’s actions.  It was inevitable that the Soviet should have been driven irresistibly to the point where it must either renounce its own existence or oppose the Provisional Government.

The dominating spirit and thought of the Soviet was that of international social democracy.  While most of the delegates believed that it was necessary to prosecute the war and to defeat the aggressions of the Central Empires, they were still Socialists, internationalists, fundamental democrats, and anti-imperialists.  Not without good and sufficient reason, they mistrusted the bourgeois statesmen and believed that some of the most influential among them were imperialists, actuated by a desire for territorial expansion, especially the annexation of Constantinople, and that they were committed to various secret treaties entered into by the old regime with England, France, and Italy.  In the meetings of the Soviet, and in other assemblages of workers, the ugly suspicion grew that the war was not simply a war for national defense, for which there was democratic sanction and justification, but a war of imperialism, and that the Provisional Government was pursuing the old ways of secret diplomacy.