Page:Karl Kautsky - Frederick Engels - 1899.djvu/33

 appearance of eternal life. If we are not so foolish as to please them by allowing ourselves to be led into street fights, there remains nothing for them save to be broken to pieces upon this fatal legality." At its close Engels pointed out in his witty way how 1,600 years before, in the Roman Empire, a dangerous revolutionary party, the Christians, in spite of pursuits and "laws of exception" of all forms, grew into a host that became an army unconquerable by force, and finally "revolutionized" the Roman Empire itself. Engels wrote this introduction on the 6th of March, 1895, the very month in which he was seized with the disease that was so soon to take him away.

If Kautsky was justified in writing in 1887 that Engels could already see the triumph of his work with his intellectual eyes, how much more must his consciousness of coming victory have been strengthened since then! In the year of his seventieth birthday came the socialist triumph in the German Parliamentary election, in which the Imperial powers were only given the privilege of setting the governmental seal upon the documentary evidence of the socialist victory. On the 1st of May, 1890, the bourgeois of Europe trembled before the resolutions of the great International Congress held in Paris in 1889; in September the anti-socialist law fell after an existence of twelve years, and in October the party convention met at Halle. On the 12th of August, 1893, Engels could rejoice at a new, a stronger and an unconquerable International—the Zurich International Socialist Congress. When, after fifty-two years, he for the first time again looked upon the cities of Vienna and Berlin, they testified to him that Marx and he "had not fought in vain, and could now look back upon their work with pride and satisfaction."

Full of pride and joy he could cry out: "There is no land, no great state, where the Social Democracy is not a power with which all must reckon. All that happens in the whole great world happens with regard to us. We are one of the 'Great Powers' which are to be feared, and upon which more depends than upon the other 'Great Powers.'" The magnificent victories in the legislative elections of France and Belgium in 1894; the Italian elections of 1895, in spite of the "state of siege" and the corruption and terrorism of Crispi—all showed the irresistible advance of the ideas and the victory of the tactics that Marx and Engels had created for the proletariat. Finally the ignominious breakdown of the force-party was the last joyous news of victory to be borne to the