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By Root 1154 0

and increased wages they had won. Day labourers earned three marks and skilled labour six marks a day, or about thirty-six shillings or eight or nine dollars a week. Mealtimes were regulated, fines and penalties posted on the bulletin board, the right to organize was recognized by the government except for servants and farm labour; child labour under thirteen was outlawed and between the ages of thirteen and fourteen was restricted to six hours a day. Gratified that such progress disproved the Marxist theory of “increasing misery,” Gompers was inspired to a paean of optimism by the status of the German worker, who appeared to him to live in an age of “the greatest production, the most wealth, the highest general intelligence and the best reasons for hope for his class that the history of the world has recorded.” Even if, in his anti-Marxist enthusiasm, Gompers overstated the case, the German worker was clearly acquiring a stake in the existing order. The effect was not conducive to revolutionary ardor in the unions. The fear that they were becoming too embedded in the existing order inspired Kautsky’s resolution to subordinate them to the political control of the party.

His motion was firmly defeated by the majority at Mannheim for fear of offending the trade unions. It was all very well to let Kautsky formulate theory, but when it came to practical matters the General Council of the party was nothing if not realistic. Defeat of the resolution meant, in effect, a victory for the trade unions. Since Kautsky’s analysis had been correct, it also meant, in the country of dominant Socialist influence, preference for the existing order over the final goal. Bernstein’s onetime heresy “I care nothing for the final goal …” was now canonical. After Mannheim, day-to-day activity became increasingly practical and revisionist, even while party declarations at Congresses and ceremonial occasions continued to reiterate the Marxist formulas.

Nationalism came in with the rising Revisionist tide. In the Reichstag on April 25, 1907, shortly before the opening of the Hague Conference, a Socialist deputy, Gustav Noske, made the trend explicit in a speech which caused a sensation. It was a “bourgeois illusion,” he announced, to suppose that all Socialists believed in disarmament. While they looked forward to peace in the future, international economic conflicts at present were too strong to permit disarming. Socialists would resist just as vigorously as the gentlemen on the right any attempt by another nation to press Germany to the wall. “We have always demanded an armed nation,” he said to the astonished gasps of his colleagues and the equally astonished delight and applause of the Right. Indignantly repudiated by Kautsky, who with considerable courage said that in the event of war, German Social-Democrats would regard themselves as proletarians first and Germans second, Noske nevertheless found many followers.

In Germany as in England the topic of coming conflict between the two countries was fashionable, fomented by the Navy League’s slogans, “The Coming War!” “England the Foe!” “England’s Plan to Fall on Us in 1911!” and the Pan-German accompaniment, “To Germany belongs the world!” In every country as the air thickened with talk of war, the instinct of patriotism swelled. Older, deeper, more instinctive than any class solidarity, it was not something easily eradicated on the say-so of the Communist Manifesto. Unhappily for world brotherhood, the worker felt he had a fatherland like anybody else.

In strident dispute, a voice, expressing the opposite tendency from Noske in Germany, was raised in France. It came from the Socialist Gustave Hervé, a shrieking prophet of anti-patriotism and anti-militarism. Once a follower of Déroulède, he had swung to the opposite extreme and attained national notoriety by his declaration during the Dreyfus Affair that as long as military barracks existed he would hope to see the tricolor flag planted upon the dunghill in their courtyards. This led to his dismissal as a teacher and trial for incitement to