Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/93

Rh Hanover] can have any doubt of what we think of violent revolution. It is absurd to admit that there is in our party a single person who would feel disposed to precipitate a revolution if he thought that he could attain his goal much better, much more easily, and much more simply. It is not revolutionaries who precipitate revolutions, but in each and every instance it has been reactionaries. [Lively applause.] Even the great Goethe said to his that when revolution occurs the fault is wholly the government's; and I could cite you a dozen passages from writers, even from old Mommsen, who as a good classicist states in his Roman History that when a government shows itself incapable of fulfilling its duties in the interest of the great majority of the citizens, then it is right to precipitate a revolution, then the fault is not on the side of those who have recourse to violence but is on the side of those who have driven them to it. And, comrades, with us in Germany the bourgeoisie at all times has acted on this principle.

Here again the theorists and leaders were applying their historical fatalism. Fata viam invenient. For the future, let princes and chancellors be good or bad, favorable or not, it would matter little. The best Caesars could not prevent the Roman Empire from going to dissolution and ruin.

To be sure, the German governments did not take at full face value the peaceful protestations of the Socialists; they continued after the lapse of the anti-Socialist law to fight the movement with every weapon at their disposal. The Prussian State Secretary for the Interior directed his under-officials in 1893 to "oppose the progress of the Social Democracy by every possible means"; and the Saxon Minister of the Interior issued a circular instructing the local authorities, "in order to conform to the intentions of the government, to interpret any law which they might invoke against the Social Democrats according to political considerations". In 1895 Liebknecht was condemned to four months' imprisonment for lèse-majesté for having declared at the Congress of Breslau that "Under cover of the highest power in the State, injury is done the Social Democracy; under the cover of the highest power in the State, the gauntlet is thrown down to our party and we are provoked to mortal combat". But the Social Democrats had already derived too many advantages from their martyrdoms really to wish a complete cessation of persecution after 1890. With an almost Christian boastfulness and mirth did they dwell upon the thought of bolts and bars, and of the rich electoral harvest that was to be reaped from the wide advertisement of their sufferings. Lieb-