Page:Edward Aveling - Wilhelm Liebknecht and the Social-Democratic Movement in Germany (1896).djvu/12

 means. What little he possessed had been confiscated, and although he had a little newspaper correspondent work, most of the thirteen years that he lived in England were years of hunger, and all of them were years of sorrow. During that time he joined the celebrated Communist League.

In 1862, on the accession of William III., there was an amnesty for political offenders, and Liebknecht returned to work upon the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Ostensibly this paper was to attack Napoleon. Its editor, August Brass, wanted Liebknecht to write extreme articles to win over the working classes. As a matter of fact, Brass was really working with and for Bismarck, whose astute object in allowing the Liebknecht articles was to get hold of the working classes and use them against the advanced middle class. When Liebknecht found this out, he at once gave up the position, although it was one that secured him against pecuniary difficulties as long as he held its

About this time, after considerable hesitation, Liebknecht joined the organisation founded by Lassalle, and known as the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiter Verein. Lassalle was then, of course, dead, and von Schweitzer was the leader of the party. He had founded a newspaper, the Social-Democrat, to which at first Marx, Engels and LiebnechtLiebknecht [sic] contributed. But here also these three writers believed after a time that treachery was again at work, and they all three withdrew from the paper. In the year 1865, Liebknecht was again banished from Berlin and Prussia. He went to Hanover and then to Leipzig. In Leipzig he met Bebel for the first time, and from their meeting and the work done by them and others dates the commencement of the formation of the present immensely powerful German Social-Democratic Party. The trade unions in Saxony were growing greatly in strength, and between them, Bebel and Liebknecht on the one hand, and the Lassallean party on the other, there was conflict. When the war of 1866 between Prussia and Austria broke out, the workers' unions of Saxony, led by Liebknecht and Bebel, declared, most unpatriotically and most socialistically, against Bismarck and Prussia. About this time Liebknecht and his friends managed to get hold of a Leipzig paper, the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, which was promptly suppressed.

In 1866 again, August, a Congress was held at Chemnitz between the Saxony unions and the Lassalleans. This Congress accepted a more or less Socialist programme which