Page:Edward Aveling - Wilhelm Liebknecht and the Social-Democratic Movement in Germany (1896).djvu/16

 managed, like the rest of the 133, by the party, and not run by any individual. The two most important of these—the Vorwärts and Hamburger Echo, each sold at less than one halfpenny apiece—are printed by compositors who only work eight hours a day, and receive the highest rate of wages, and all the contributors and correspondents are paid. Out of these two papers alone some £4,000 was made for the party last year.

In conclusion, let us return for a moment to the man who has done so much to make the great German Social-Democratic Party what it is. In estimating him and his works, no words of ours could be better than those written in the Vorwärts, and those written by Bebel in the Neue Zeit. The Vorwärts says:—"Everyone knows that Liebknect's name is most intimately interwoven with the history of the German Social-Democracy; that he has devoted to it his whole knowledge, the whole strength of his mind and will, his inflexible courage, and that he, up to the very present hour, is ceaselessly working for it with the written and the spoken word, in newspapers and pamphlets, as teacher in the schools of Social-Democracy, as agitator and speaker at meetings. Congresses, and Parliament. … Strong and elastic as steel, fresh in spirit as a young man, full of confidence in the final victory of Social-Democracy, and as joyous in the fight as ever, thus appears to-day the seventy years old veteran of the German Workers' battalions." Finally, this is how his friend and fellow-worker Bebel speaks of him, who, after the death of Frederick Engels, is the veteran of the party, and is the last and only one of its original leaders that stood by its cradle. "He embodies in his own person its long years of fight and their consequences, but also embodies in his own person the victory and growth of that party. … He has always in those fights stood as a brave soldier in the foremost ranks. … With unbroken activity he has dedicated himself, both in speech and writing, to agitation with a zeal that throws us younger men into the shade. To-day the seventy-year-old man stands before us, unbroken in body and spirit, as one who, in the words of Schiller, has done the best work of his time. … The seventieth birthday of Wilhelm Liebknecht is not only a day of honour for him, but also for the party which honours itself most in honouring him."