Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/81

Rh Frankfort Assembly and would achieve national unification not under the aegis of Prussia, not with the aid of militarism, not at the expense of the exclusion of Austria. The result was that in February, 1865, while Schweitzer was penning his fulsome praises of Bismarck's Schleswig-Holstein policy, Liebknecht resigned his connection with the Socialdemokrat and turned his attention to propaganda in Saxony, which then was a field ripening to the anti-Prussian harvester. To his own brand of Socialism Liebknecht speedily won August Bebel and a sufficient number of other Saxon workingmen to admit of the election of himself and Bebel as representatives of a Sächsische Volkspartei in the Reichstag of the North German Confederation.

In this Reichstag, newly created in 1867 as a result of the Seven Weeks' War, Liebknecht and Bebel found themselves beside Schweitzer, who had been elected by votes of the General Association of German Workingmen. Their differences about national policy were more patent than ever. Schweitzer insisted upon taking the credit for Bismarck's condescending acquiescence in the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in the North German Confederation; he considered the Confederation a fait accompli which should not be undone if it could, and which should be utilized to further social and economic reforms for the workingmen. Liebknecht and Bebel, on the other hand, maintained that universal suffrage for the Reichstag was delusive so long as it was hedged about by so many constitutional restrictions and rendered impotent by the retention of the three-class electoral system in all-powerful Prussia; they protested vehemently against the very existence of the North German Confederation as consecrating the policy of violence and of Prussian monarchical domination; they refused to make terms with a political order based on brute force, injustice, and autocracy.

In vain did Liebknecht endeavor to discredit Schweitzer with the majority of the General Association. Unable to force him out of its presidency, Liebknecht at length convened a minority congress at Eisenach in August, 1869, and there formed a rival organization—the Social Democratic Workingmen's Party (Sozialdemokratlsche Arbeiterpartei)—with a Marxian programme and a Marxian organization. The secessionists from the Lassallean association were promptly affiliated with the International which Karl Marx had launched at London in 1864, only a few weeks after the death of Lassalle. From 1869 to 1875 the two rival societies existed side by side and for some time Eisenachers and Lassalleans vied with