Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/90

80 to bring them into conflict with the police and consequently to result in punishment under the anti-Socialist law than were the street-corner harangues addressed to the unskilled, unorganized, lowest-class workingmen. Numerical gains to the Socialist cause were far greater, during the period, from among trade-unionists—the "aristocracy of labor"—than from among the lowest orders of the laboring class. Trade-unionists turned naturally to Socialism as soon as the government impaired the right of association, but they were far less interested in the theoretical side of Socialism than in the practical. They were doubting Thomases about the paradise beyond the cataclysm and they were downright sceptical of what Georges Sorel has termed the "social myth" of the "general strike"; they were, however, intent upon exercising their political rights to the end that they might forthwith secure higher pay, shorter hours, and better working and living conditions. They rendered lip-service to the Marxian creed but at heart they were Lassalleans. They constituted a conservative bulwark to German Socialism.

Then, in the third place, it was during the period of the antiSocialist law that the German Social Democracy began to draw to itself a number of voters far in excess of the number of its regularly enrolled members. In other words, it was during this time that many middle-class Germans, caring little or nothing about the purely economic dogmas or the ultimate goal of Socialism, began to cast votes for Social Democratic candidates for the Reichstag as the most obvious and direct rebuke to an illiberal and unrepresentative government, which was most seriously abridging the freedom of speech, of association, of meeting, and of the press. The contemporaneous decline of the National Liberal and Progressive parties was not due wholly to defections to conservatism; it illuminatingly paralleled the growth of the electoral strength of the Social Democrats. Thus, the popular vote for Socialist candidates, reduced to 312,000 in 1881, rose to 550,000 in 1884, to 763,100 in 1887, and to 1,427,300 in 1890; while the number of Socialist deputies in the Reichstag increased from nine in 1878 to thirty-five in 1890. The "extra members" of the German Social Democracy had no direct voice in the deliberations of the party congresses or in the decisions of the party executive, but as time went on there was a growing tendency on the part of congress and executive not to make decisions which would alienate votes and thereby lessen the influence which a steadily augmenting poll-strength might exert upon the reactionary government. The getting of votes was becom-