ing all-important; and indirectly middle-class liberals were pointing the Socialist party organization into the path of opportunism. And in seeming confirmation of the value of the peaceful tactics pursued by the party from 1878 to 1890 could be cited a sort of Socialist "prosperity" evidenced not only in an increase of votes but also in a remarkable increase of funds in the party treasury. At the Congress of Halle in 1890, August Bebel explained that the regular receipts had been 37,410 marks in 1880, 95,000 in 1883, 208,655 in 1887, and in the current year had risen to 324,322 marks, and that of the last amount over one-third had been saved; "the Socialist party", he added, in the midst of general hilarity, "become capitalistic, seeks good investments abroad for fear of confiscation at home".
Bebel should not have feared confiscation at home. Bismarck, it is true, still maintained that the only defect of the anti-Socialist law was its leniency, but neither the Reichstag nor William II. would hear of re-enacting it, to say nothing of making it more drastic, and this, despite the fact that the Social Democracy was a greater political force in 1890 than in 1878. So impressed was the young emperor with the importance of Socialism, that he sought to deal with it in a clement and kindly spirit.[1] His ousting of Bismarck in 1890 signified, so far as the Social Democrats were concerned, the passing of Diocletian and the coming of Constantine.
For the happy ending of their twelve years' bondage, the Social Democrats themselves ascribed the praise not to the favor of a clement prince but to their own energy and endeavors, and above all to the persistently peaceful tactics which they had employed. "No violence, no rebellion", was a slogan which in their opinion had amply justified itself in a most pragmatic test.
In 1890 the German Social Democracy came out of its catacombs, and at Halle inaugurated the series of great annual congresses which assembled regularly on German soil down to the Jena Congress of 1913. The public organization of the party, as we know it, with its five-member executive, its commission of control, its Reichstag group, its annual congress, its treasury, its affiliated trade-unions, its branches for women and for youths, and its official publications, was inaugurated at the Halle Congress of 1890 and perfected at the Mainz Congress of 1900. Its programme was revised and promulgated at the Erfurt Congress of 1891. The Ger-
- ↑ See on this point the Memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe and the Reminiscences of Prince Bismarck. It was in 1890 that William II. convened at Berlin the International Congress on Labor Legislation. Cf. Europäischer Geschichtskalender for 1890 and 1891.
