with the Tsar for the suppression of the Russian revolution, the apostles of revolutionary syndicalism temporarily became very influential. The Jena Congress of 1905 endorsed the principle of the general strike "in case of an attack upon universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage or upon the right of combination".[1] But the German trade-unionists in their congress at Cologne overwhelmingly rejected the principle: they were unwilling to sacrifice their accumulated funds and endanger their own livelihood by bearing the brunt of a struggle which, whatever good it might do the Russian democracy, was not likely to be of considerable immediate service to themselves individually. Under pressure from the trade-unionists, the Socialist Congress at Mannheim in 1906 reopened the question and in the protracted, bitter debate which ensued, August Bebel threw all his prestige and oratorical gifts into the scale on the side of the trade-unionists and other advocates of "moderation" and "parliamentary action".
Very few of you, comrades [said Bebel on that occasion], have experienced a great war. You have no notion of the situation on the outbreak of war in 1870. Of course we have grown much stronger since then, but the forces at the disposal of the anti-Socialists have grown too. ["Quite right!"] Above all, the nature of military armament has completely changed. Who believes that at a moment when a violent shock, a fever, is moving the masses to their very depths, when the danger of a gigantic war with its appalling misery confronts us—who believes that at such a moment it is possible to institute a general strike? ["Quite right!"] The idea is childish. From the first day of such a war there march under arms in Germany five million men including many hundreds of thousands of our party comrades. The entire nation is in arms. Frightful want, universal unemployment, starvation, stoppage of factories, fall of paper securities—is it credible that at such a moment when each is thinking only of himself, one could institute a general strike? ["Very good!"] If any leaders of the party were so senseless as to institute a general strike on such a day, martial law would at once be extended, along with the mobilization, over the whole of Germany, and decisions would then pass from the civil courts to the courts martial. I have often heard it said—and I think it probable because in governmental circles it is supposed that the Social Democrats could be crazy enough to take such a course—I have often heard it said that exalted persons have long nursed the idea of preparing the same fate for all the leaders of the Social Democracy as was meted out in 1870 to the members of our party executive. If you think that in such a case our adversaries will exercise any clemency, you are mistaken; I think it inconceivable that in any such case any should be expected. Things are different with us from things in other countries. Germany is a kind of state like unto no other. That may
- ↑ Handbuch der Sozialdemokratischen Parteitage von 1863–1909 (ed. Wilhelm Schröder, 1910), p. 306.
