Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/80

70 "the mighty genius" of Frederick the Great, "a man admirable in every respect", and of "the remarkable" and "the praiseworthy" policy of Bismarck.

It has long been customary for Socialist historians and apologists to denounce Schweitzer as "the paid agent of Bismarck" and as a renegade (and something of a renegade he was, after 1872) and to emphasize the differences between his corrupt movement on the one hand and the pure movement of and  on the other. A re-examination and reappraisal of the facts in the matter, however, while establishing neither proof nor disproof of Schweitzer's alleged acceptance of bribes from Bismarck, would seem to show that Liebknecht and Schweitzer were separated far less on the question of Socialist principles than on the question of political tactics. Liebknecht, it is true, during his thirteen years' exile in England lived much in the society of Marx and Engels and shared their radical views to a greater degree than Lassalle or Schweitzer. But Marx and Engels by this time were not preaching violence or rebellion; and that there was no incompatibility of major tactics between Lassalle and Liebknecht is evidenced by the fact that the latter was a great admirer of the standard-bearer of English Tory Socialism. Disraeli's Sybil was translated by Liebknecht's wife and given an honorable place in the German Socialist library. Liebknecht himself, like Marx and Engels, trusted the feudal aristocracy of Prussia less than that of England and disliked Lassalle's flirtations with Bismarck as well as the autocratic organization of the General Association of German Workingmen. But a difference of quite another sort better explains the bitterness with which Liebknecht and his disciple Bebel subsequently assailed Schweitzer and the General Association. Bebel was a Saxon and Liebknecht was a native of Hesse, and both men shared the South Germans' fear and hatred of Prussia. Liebknecht, an enfant terrible of 1848–1849, had come to decry the use of violence as a result of his stirring and disheartening experiences in those years, but he never lost faith in the ultimate triumph of the ideal of that revolutionary movement—a Greater Germany welded together under a republican form of government for the attainment of thoroughgoing social democracy. These principles might be the eventual goal of Lassalle and Schweitzer, but the means of reaching the goal were quite different. The latter, as we have seen, would solve the immediate problem of German unification precisely as Bismarck was preparing to solve it; Liebknecht and Bebel, on the other hand, would hark back to the days of the