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bourgeois who did not have the same historical education and who did not come into collision with clerical ambitions had no incentive whatsoever to seek the co-operation of the people. The reformed clergy, fulfilling a function of the state, remained subordinate to the established authorities. The ecclesiastical communities did not monopolize either large portions of the land or any part of the industry and commerce.
This brief analysis will perhaps explain the diversity of the currents in the German Social Democracy.
The Congress of Magdeburg held in September gave its attention to the theoretical and practical contentions which arose between the North and the South, more especially between the Executive Committee of Berlin and the group of Baden deputies. The seventeen members of the Diet of Carlsruhe who voted the budget in spite of the interdiction that has always been maintained by the German Social-Democratic congresses and consecarted even by an international congress, appeared as the champions of alliances with the liberals. In fact, they had entered into a "bloc" analgous to that which existed in France from 1889 to 1905.
The adversaries of socialism try to ridicule the principles that prohibit the adoption of the budget by the representatives of the workingmen's parties. It is certain that such a prohibition has only a symbolic value, which value, however, is by no means a negligible quantity. The rejection of the budgets demanded by the government shows that Socialism fights the modern state face to face, and refuses it the means of subsistance in proportion as its power increases. However, this is not the place to enter into a controversy on this subject. The Baden representatives in conceding the money to the government did not merely violate a formal order. They trampled underfoot the doctrine of the class struggle in order to bring about the collaboration of the proletariat with the middle class. It was virtually equivalent to embracing in toto the revisionist principles of which Bernstein had previously given a dogmatic and documentary exposition. The Baden men were condemned. In fact, their condemnation was a foregone conclusion. But what surprised even the most uncompromising of their opponents was that the most qualified of the members of the Carlsruhe Diet, Frank, declared he would not bend before the decision of the majority of the delegates. Thus, the old quarrel between Marxian doctrinarianism and revisionism, instead of losing its edge when a resolution was passed, as many times before, grew sharper, and turned into a schism.
But there will be no schism, and the unity of the Social Democracy is safe. Prussian absolutism, the imperial autocracy, has already taken it upon itself to reconcile the left with the right. When at the conclusion of the Congress the long-standing struggle was invoked which Socialists of Prussia have carried on in order to conquer political rights, the right of equal suffrage, the southern delegates, amid general applause, declared they would be on their side. And a cry of hope went up from the workingmen's delegates, and a breath of revolution swept the assembly.
The democratic alliances that might have worked out slow transformations, the coalitions between the workingmen and the liberals or the radicals are more precarious, more chimerical, and more ineffective in Germany even than in any other country. Even when the ire of the parties devoted to constitutional parliamentarism is roused against the imperial whims and vagaries, they still retain their distrust of the Social Democracy. The normal rule for contemporary politics is the liberal-agrarian combination; nay more, it is the grouping of all the forces of social conservation against the party which seeks to overthrow the present order of society. The radical left dreads the threats of the Social Democrats more than the fatuous blunders of the Kaiser. The very logic of events condemns revisionism and dedicates the workingman to majestic isolation. But this isolation engenders a revolutionary spirit. Allied with the liberals the Social Democracy would eschew all action outside the law. Left to itself and free, it no longer admits the same limitations. Recently it offered a new spectacle both to those who exalted and to those who criticized their uniformly prudent and pacific attitude. At Copenhagen it no longer rejects in express terms the general strike considered as a means to paralyze war. At Magdeburg it admitted the general strike as useful in making political demands. When one thinks of the horror which it formerly manifested of the general strike, one will perceive that there has been some change in its mentality. But before the congresses it had already organized in answer to the police interdictions large and solemn demonstrations which disturbed the official circles. On the very day after the Congress, the Moabit riots broke out, which sounded like the overture to an era of trouble. The labor unions, the great federations of workingmen, hitherto so measured in their movements and actions, now ostensibly incline to harsher tactics. And the militant organizations of the employers likewise confederated take the initiative and answer the threats of strike with the declarations of a lockout, throwing hundreds of thousands of men on the street and carrying the social struggle to a degree of exasperation it never before reached in Germany.
When during the September troubles the conservative press urged the government to bring out its troops and mow down or shoot the manifestants, the emperor, it is said, refused to concede its demands. Certain it is that no soldiers appeared on the streets of Moabit.
A week before, at the Magdeburg Congress, the reading of General Bissing's secret order of the day created a general stir in Germany, because it was the first time that an official document, the authenticity of which was not denied, betrayed the fear of revolution prevailing in high places. Kaiser Wilhelm did not want to bring the army into contact with the crowd. The hour had not yet struck. And besides it is a tradition of the German government to avoid any collision between the troops and the strikers. It
