continually reinforced, the debts of nations and their loads of taxes are continually mounting up, and a feeling of anxiety, as at the advent of an immense catastrophe, continually strengthens its hold on the civilized peoples and forbids them peacefully enjoying the fruits of their labor. … [Instead of arbitration and disarmament] we see the ruling classes and their solution, "If you want peace, you must be armed for war", with which they carry on their policy of embittering nations in order to maintain their own class-rule in domestic affairs. The military and naval armaments serve to enrich them. Besides, they cherish the thought on the sly that nations kept in constant anxiety about a grasping and warlike neighbor do not apply themselves to improve their social conditions as they otherwise could and would. This policy of international ruin, in which Germany to-day sets the pace, we have hitherto most decidedly opposed, and we shall continue to oppose it.[1]
Again the government invoked the red demon of revohitionary and traitorous Socialism; again Conservatives and National Liberals, "patriots" of every stamp, rallied in defense of family, morality, country, Kaiser, and God, and incidentally of a very vigorous foreign and world policy; and again when the votes were counted it was discovered that the Social Democrats had suffered a signal defeat. True, the Social Democrats had gained 248,200 popular votes over their number in the general election of 1903, but their representation in the Reichstag, thanks to the adroitness of Bülow[2] and the co-operation of the various bourgeois parties, had been cut from eighty-one to forty-three.[3]
The national verdict of 1907 had a most sobering and moderating effect upon the German Social Democracy. The party, which for all practical purposes had repudiated the general strike, now found the realization of its one remaining hope—majority control of the Reichstag—further off than at any time since 1890. This sad discovery dampened the ardor of extreme Marxists and galvanized the Revisionists into greater activity. Without moving for the withdrawal of the ban promulgated against them at Lübeck in 1901, the Revisionists now slowly but surely communicated much of their "heresy" to the entire party. A much larger delegation in the Reichstag must be obtained. For this purpose a phenomenal increase in the succeeding popular elections must be secured. To this end the party must not alienate well-organized trade-unionists
- ↑ Signed by seventy-eight Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag and published in Vorwärts, December 16, 1906. Translation in Ensor, Modern Socialism, pp. 370–371.
- ↑ Prince von Bülow in his Imperial Germany gives a naively candid account of his remarkable activities and manoeuvres in the epochal elections of 1907.
- ↑ For an admirable explanation of the elections from the standpoint of the leading Revisionist, see Bernstein. "The German Elections and the Social Democrats", in the Contemporary Review. XCI. 479–492 (April, 1907).
