Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/88

78 their unrepresentative government the responsibility for a most serious set-back to liberty.

One other aspect of the anti-Socialist law invites our attention, and this is its effect upon the Social Democrats themselves. From first to last they submitted to the outrageous measure. They preached no violence, no rebellion. Smitten on one cheek, they turned the other cheerfully and dutifully. They seemed to be possessed of a holy joy, of an ecstatic other-worldly vision, like unto that of the early Christian martyrs. To their own traditions—those of Lassalle in the constitutional crisis of 1863, and of Liebknecht and Bebel in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—they were absolutely true. They would be vocal but not violent. While the bill against them was pending in the Reichstag, Vorwärts printed at the top of every number the exhortation: "Party Comrades! Do not let yourselves be provoked to violence! The authorities are only anxious to shoot you down! The reaction needs riots in order to win its game." With Vorwärts suppressed and with the party organization reduced to catacomb-like secrecy, the Socialists kept their passive form to the end. At the party congress held at St. Gall in Switzerland in October, 1887, they unanimously declared that

It may well be that this persistently passive attitude of the Social Democrats in the face of their persecution was not unconnected with the growing devotion of their leaders during the period to Marxian, as opposed to Lassallean, principles, that is, to the fatalistic notion that the hardships and oppressions of capitalistic society simply cannot be prevented from accumulating and multiplying up to the day of the millennial cataclysm when the faithful will automatically be delivered from bondage and will enter into the Promised Land. Not from Bismarck or any other governmental potentate could salvation come, but only from the slow, painful, inevitable evolution of capitalism. At any rate, after 1880, Marxian tenets sank deeply into the German Socialist consciousness. The appearance of Friedrich Engels's Herrn Eugen Dührings