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By Root 1200 0

Haywood from the United States, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontay for the various Russian factions, Mme Kama of India, the “Red virgins,” Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, and among the polyglot translators, Angelica Balabanov from Italy accompanied by a “violently protesting bullish young man with a dark face,” Benito Mussolini. As a demonstration of Socialist strength an outdoor demonstration was held on the opening day, a Sunday, in a field outside the city. Workingmen and their families came from all around, filling the streets leading to the field where a dozen red-draped platforms had been set up for the speakers. Bands played and choral societies sang Socialist hymns while vigilant police watched over the proceedings from two captive balloons. By 2 P.M. a crowd of fifty thousand had gathered to listen to the Socialist celebrities amid “extraordinary enthusiasm but no disorder.” In his speech Bebel congratulated the British proletariat on its recent brilliant success at the polls, remarking with perhaps a touch of envy that while the Government had cleverly made John Burns a member of the Cabinet, he was sure it had not succeeded in changing the party’s fighting tactics. Loud cheers greeted Jaurès’ speech, delivered in German. Though he could memorize a German translation of his speech after one reading or recite long passages of Goethe by heart, he could not command enough colloquial German to engage a hotel room.

Afterwards in the hall amid the admirable German arrangements everyone, understandably, had a sense of deliberating under the eyes of the police. When Harry Quelch, an English delegate, disrespectfully referred to the Hague Conference, then in session, as a “thieves’ supper,” Chancellor von Bülow, who was not notably respectful toward the Conference himself, brought pressure on the Wüttemberg government to have him expelled. Immediately ill at ease, Bebel did not even protest. Quelch’s empty chair was kept filled with flowers during the remaining sessions.

While the Congress divided as usual into committees on suffrage, women, minorities, immigration, colonialism and other problems, the Committee on Anti-militarism was the focus of attention. The duty of the working class in the face of rising militarism and threat of war, placed on the agenda by the French, unleashed five days of debate. In an opening tirade, Hervé again proposed mass disobedience to mobilization, in effect insurrection. Since this could be transformed into revolution, it was supported by the German Radicals led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, but the official weight of the party, from old Marxists like Bebel and Kautsky to new nationalists of the Noske variety, shifted solidly to the right. Debating “within earshot, so to speak, of the Wilhelmstrasse,” as Vandervelde put it, the Germans muted their customary verbal tornadoes, though not only from discretion; the shift was ideological. Some admittedly, some still pretending otherwise, they were aligning themselves with the national mood, accommodating to the facts of life in an era of national expansion from which the worker derived material benefits. “It is not true that workers have no Fatherland,” declared Georg von Vollmar, a leading Revisionist; “the love of humanity does not prevent us from being good Germans.” He and his group, he said, would not accept an internationalism that was anti-national.

Jaurès proposed the same resolution as had just been adopted by the French Congress, emphasizing “agitation” and including the general strike as a last resort.

To expect an effective general strike without planning or organization was equivalent to expecting an army to march without orders, billets, supply depots, transport, food or ammunition. Even if the Second International could have agreed on a general strike, it had no power to give orders to its national components, each of whom would have had to organize the strike of its own people separately. Unless the action were simultaneous and international, the workers who accomplished it most effectively would only