eyes of patriotic, peace-loving, property-owning Germans the bogey of Socialism, the "red spectre" of mob violence, treason, and terrorism. So effective was this invocation of an imaginary demon, that Liberalism, if not Social Democracy, was immediately weakened,[1] and Bismarck was thenceforth free to break his unnatural liaison with the Liberals and to return to his earlier Conservative love. The period from 1878 to 1890 was not only the period of the anti-Socialist law; it was also the period of Conservative rather than Liberal influence; its ideal was benevolent bureaucratic paternalism instead of individual liberty and national laisser faire; it was characterized by the establishment of tariff-protectionism, overseas imperialism, and Bismarckian State Socialism. So successful, indeed, was the electoral coup of 1878 that not only Bismarck himself but subsequent and less original chancellors found it expedient rather frequently to terrify the German people with the red rag of Socialism and thereby to elicit from them a verdict favorable to militarism, to tariff reform "upwards", to colonialism and Weltpolitik, or to any other policy which an essentially unrepresentative government might at any time wish to foist upon the German nation.
In this way, the anti-Socialist law called an abrupt halt to the progress of liberty and democracy in the empire. In the late 'sixties and early 'seventies it had seemed as if united Germany was to play quite a different political rôle from historic Austria or Prussia. Universal equal suffrage had been introduced in the North German Confederation and extended to the empire. The North German Confederation had legalized coalitions and associations of artisans for trade purposes. The empire had adopted on May 7, 1874, a law on the freedom of the press, providing that neither the administration nor the courts could deprive any citizen of the right of carrying on any part of a publishing business and that the only limitations upon the exercise of this right should be such as would secure a fair amount of publicity and lessen national danger in time of war. A reaction against these liberal and democratic tendencies was foreshadowed by the anti-Catholic laws which attended the Kulturkampf. But the anti-Catholic laws were mainly state laws, while the anti-Socialist law was federal, and with the passage of the latter the reaction was in full swing. Associations, meetings, publications, and collections of money alike,
- ↑ In the Reichstag, National Liberal deputies numbered 141 in 1877; 109 in 1878; 47 in 1881; and 42 in 1890. Progressive deputies numbered 39 in 1877; 29 in 1878; and 32 in 1887. The popular vote of the National Liberals, amounting in 1877 to 1,604,300, had decreased in 1878 to 1,486,800, and in 1890 to 1,177,800.
