Page:Friedrich Engels - The Revolutionary Act - tr. Henry Kuhn (1922).pdf/26

 was made secure because any war was made impossible other than a world war of unheard-of horrors and of absolutely incalculable outcome. On the other hand, this military transformation caused the cost of maintaining these armies to rise in geometric progression, drove taxation to unattainable heights and thereby the poorer classes of the people into the arms of Socialism. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the most immediate cause of the mad competition in armaments, might produce a chauvinist cleavage between the French and the German bourgeoisie; but for the workers of both countries it formed a new bond of union. The anniversary of the Paris Commune became the first common festive day for the entire proletariat.

The war of 1870–71 and the defeat of the Commune had, as predicated by Marx, shifted the center of gravity of the European labor movement, for the time being, from France to Germany. In France, of course, years were required to recover from the blood-letting of May, 1871. In Germany, however, where industry fertilized by the French milliard indemnity was developed with hot-house rapidity, the Social Democracy grew still more rapidly and effectively. Thanks to the discernment with which the workers utilized the general franchise, introduced in 1866, the astonishing growth of the party lies in incontestable figures open before all the world. 1871: 102,000; 1874: 352,000; 1877: 493,000 Social Democratic votes. Then came the high governmental acknowledgment of this