CHAPTER III.
Our Party should have been prepared to recognize the real aims of this war, to meet it without surprise, to judge it by its deeper relationship according to their wide political experience. The events and forces that led to August 4th, 1914, were no secrets. The world had been preparing for decades, in broad daylight, in the widest publicity, step by step and hour by hour, for the world war. And if today a number of Socialists threaten with horrible destruction the "secret diplomacy" that has brewed this deviltry behind the scenes, they are ascribing to these poor wretches a magic power that they little deserve, just as the Botokude whips his fetish for the outbreak of a storm. The so-called captains of nations are, in this war, as at all times, merely chessmen, moved by all-powerful historic events and forces, on the surface of capitalist society. If ever there were persons capable of understanding these events and occurrences, it was the members of the German Social-Democracy.
Two lines of development in recent history lead straight to the present war. One has its origin in the period when the so-called national states, i. e. the modern states, were first constituted, from the time of the Bismarckian war against France. The war of 1870, which, by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, threw the French Republic into the arms of Russia, split Europe into two opposing camps and opened up a period of insane competitive armament, first piled up the fire-brands for the present world conflagration. Bismarck's troops were still stationed in France when Marx wrote to the "Braunschweiger Ausschuss":
"He who is not deafened by the momentary clamor and is not interested in deafening the German people, must see that the war of 1870 carries with it, of necessity, a war between Germany and Russia, just as the war of 1866 bore the war of 1870. I say of necessity, unless the unlikely should happen, unless a revolu-
