feeling that I have not done justice to the movement. Too much has been said about its international policies and its merely tactical manoeuvres in German politics, and too little about its greatest and best contributions to the Germany of the present and of the future. Quite aside from its failures to establish a Marxian society and order in the Fatherland and to usher in a universal brotherhood of the world's workingmen, it has done more than any other single factor—more, it may be said without exaggeration, than all other factors put together—to preserve to twentieth-century Germany the heritage of the days of 1848, a passionate longing for political democracy, for individual liberties, for social equality. To this, its four-and-a-quarter million electoral followers are an eloquent testimony. To-day political Germany as a whole is a thinly disguised military despotism, and the Reichstag, the popular assembly, is not much more efficacious than any respectable debating society. But outside the form of German political life are two million workingmen, including three-fourths of the trade-unionists of the country, who have had an excellent training, through their local organization, their annual congresses, and their press, in the methods and procedure, in the problems and responsibilities, of democratic self-government; and for this training they—and the friends of democracy throughout the world—have the German Social Democracy to thank.
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