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94 measure of protection". Ambiguities were deemed preferable to party splits. Even "principles" must not be exalted above the requirements of vote-getting.

So chastening was the effect of the elections of 1907 upon the German Social Democracy that Bebel himself became something of a champion of the government in spite of its high-handed methods of combating his party. On the very morrow of the elections Bebel declared at the International Congress of Stuttgart that

Another effect of the elections of 1907 upon the German Social Democracy was to settle beyond doubt the much-mooted question of co-operation with bourgeois parties in electoral campaigns. Bernstein had advocated such a policy as early as 1893, but it had been condemned by the Cologne Congress in that year. It had been debated, with special reference to the curious three-class electoral system in Prussia, at the Hamburg Congress of 1897 and at the Stuttgart Congress of 1898, but without decisive results. At the Hanover Congress of 1899, largely under Revisionist influence, the following resolution was adopted:

Next year the Mainz Congress applied this general principle specifically to the impending Prussian elections: