Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/106

96 unionists, far more Lassallean than Marxist in general outlook, while their Reichstag representatives, frantically endeavoring to bridge the wide gulf between the voting-strength and the membership-strength of the party, were ever veering toward opportunist tactics.

At the very first session of the newly-elected Reichstag, the Marxist wing fell back almost pathetically but quite naturally upon fatalism and abhorrence of violence. As Ledebour expressed it:

And Hugo Haase, on whom the mantle of Bebel was about to fall, quoted Lassalle's dicta against violent revolutions, and endorsed Kautsky's statements:

To the rising anti-Russian feeling which was now gradually overspreading all Germany, the Social Democrats, in consonance with their traditions and principles, could contribute, and in its popularity they could share. In 1912 they talked much about the need of a rapprochement between Germany on the one side and France and Great Britain on the other in order to curb the ambitions of "Tsarism and Russian barbarism". For example, Eduard David, speaking in the Reichstag on foreign policy, after qualifying his praise of the Triple Alliance by the statement that "if perchance Austria should attack Serbia and Russia should hasten to Serbia's assistance, we should not be bound by the engagements of the Alliance to take up arms", went on to say that "the division of the Western European powers had led to the situation where Russia could reach out unhindered in all directions for new masses of land and likewise could assume a most threatening attitude in the Balkan question".