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By Root 1312 0

Marx and revolution, Shaw did not spare his contempt, in his reports of the Congress, for Wilhelm Liebknecht’s duping of his followers with the “rhetoric of the barricade.” The German leaders, he decided thereafter, were forty years out of date. At sixty-seven, Liebknecht, founder of the party in 1875, was now its elder statesman. Descended from a long line of university professors reaching back to the Eighteenth Century, he had been imprisoned for his role in the bourgeois revolution of 1848, and afterwards lived in exile in England for thirteen years, where he studied with Marx. When he died in 1900 a crowd of an estimated hundred thousand mourners and spectators lined the streets along the route of his four-hour funeral procession.

By all but Shaw the German party was considered the hope of Socialism, bearer of the torch in the country from which Marx expected revolution to come. Everyone was impressed by its size and strength, its wonderful organization, its twenty-eight secretaries and organizers, its training program for party workers, and its mounting membership. In the elections of 1893 the Social-Democrats increased their votes to 1,750,000, close to 25 per cent of the total, more than those of any other single party. Since it was against principle to join forces with any bourgeois party, the Social-Democrats in the Reichstag remained, despite their numbers, a relatively impotent group in what was in any case an impotent body. The fact of their existence, however, exerted a silent pressure which made the Government more reasonable toward concessions. The Kaiser, who in the first careless rapture of his dismissal of Bismarck had lifted the anti-Socialist law in 1890, recovered quickly. By 1895 he had decided that the Social-Democrats were a “gang of traitors” who “do not deserve the name of Germans” and by 1897 that the party “which does not stop attacking the person of the All-Highest Ruler must be rooted out to the last stump.” In 1895 Liebknecht was arrested on a charge of lèse-majesté for a speech of which Shaw said that it could have been made “by Mr. Arthur Balfour to the Primrose League tomorrow with the approbation of England.” But this was no special mark of repression, since it could happen to anyone in Germany.

National tended to outweigh class traits among the German Socialists: they were more obedient than bold. For all its size the party did not venture to play host to an International Socialist Congress on German soil until 1907. Despite fiery speeches its leaders were prudent in action; they restricted May Day demonstrations to the evening so as not to interfere with work. Work stoppage, said Liebknecht, was general strike and “a general strike is general nonsense.” In Munich no May Day demonstration was permitted until 1901 and then only on condition that it took place outside city limits and did not form crowds in the streets on the way. Columns of Socialists, “their pockets bulging with radishes,” accompanied by wives and children, marched briskly in dead silence through the city to a beer garden on the outskirts where they drank beer and munched their radishes and struck a Russian exile as “not at all resembling a May Day celebration of working-class triumph.”

They were better off, however, than any Russian worker. Under the heavy throb of German industrial expansion, employment was increasing faster than the population. Unions, under these conditions, were successful in raising wages. Social legislation, originally bestowed from above by Bismarck to weld labour to his state, was the most advanced of any country. By 1903, 18,000,000 workers were insured against accident, 13,000,000 against old age and 11,000,000 against illness, with a total annual expenditure of $100,000,000 in social welfare benefits. Laws regulated wages, hours, time off, grievance procedures, safety measures, and the number of factory windows and toilets. With characteristic thoroughness Germany’s rulers wanted to ensure physical efficiency, leaving as little as possible to chance and bringing everything possible under