Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/94

84 knecht gleefully paid the penalty for his crime of lèse-majesté during the winter of 1897–1898, and being released on March 18, the anniversary of the revolution of 1848, more gleefully still recounted his martyrdom to a monster mass-meeting held at Berlin in celebration of the event. "I can be content", he had already written, "with the Breslau trial. If Paris was worth a Mass, this trial was well worth four months in prison. The advantages which we derive from it have been a good bargain." A conspicuous place in every annual report of the party executive, moreover, was reserved for an exhibit of the total terms of detention in workhouse and in prison, and of the total fines meted out to Socialist "martyrs". The exhibit was deemed an excellent bit of propaganda and at least until 1900 was quite imposing.

Meanwhile, the German Social Democracy grew apace. Its popular vote increased to 1,786,700 in 1893, to 2,107,100 in 1898, and to 3,010,800 in 1903, while its deputies in the Reichstag numbered 44 in 1893, 56 in 1898, and 81 in 1903. As in the preceding period, a large part of its electoral increment came from "extra members"; but from regularly enrolled paying members the returns to the party treasury amounted in 1893 to 258,326 marks, in 1898 to 315,866, and in 1903 to 628,247. The causes of this noteworthy growth in votes and in financial resources are to be found in the marvellously rapid contemporaneous expansion of German trade and German industry, in the lapse of the anti-Socialist law, which