Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/72



1848 Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto, that "birth-cry of modern Socialism" which, by its strident appeals to the demons of Revolution and proletarian Internationalism, was well calculated to affright divine-right monarchs and to terrify all respectable well-to-do bourgeois. "You have nothing to lose but your chains", cried the prophets of the new and awful dispensation: "you have a world to win; workingmen of all countries, unite!" In 1914 the German disciples of the Communist gospel, more numerous by far than their comrades in any other country, stood staunchly loyal to Kaiser as well as to Fatherland, and voted taxes and gave their lives, seemingly in perfect concord with the titled nobility and the wealthy middle class, in order that victory in a huge world-war should be wrested by Germans from other nationalities, even from the workingmen of other nationalities; of internationalism, so emphasized in 1848, they now said little, and of revolution, revolt, or rebellion, they breathed not a word. Yet the attitude of the German Social Democrats in 1914, far from being determined on the spur of the moment by frenzy or absence of thought, was in fact conditioned quite rationally by certain developments in the evolution of German Socialism since 1848. It is the intent of this paper to reconsider the history of the German Social Democratic movement in a new light, in the light of the present world-conflagration, and to present certain facts which, although they have escaped popular attention, may afford an illuminating commentary on the gradual elimination of the tactics and policies that in an earlier day had made German Social Democracy feared and hated and thoroughly disreputable.

It is not without significance that organized Socialism in Germany is hardly older than the ministry of Bismarck. It stepped into the political arena at a time when violent revolutionary republicanism had been discredited and when the ablest and most forceful Prussian Junker was already in the saddle with his baggage of a more or less benevolent Hohenzollern paternalism. There was no