Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/58

 manslaughter and murder counts for officers and soldiers exactly as for civil persons who commit murder or allow it. If it cannot be proven that the soldier was absolutely obliged to shoot in self-defense or in justification of legal conditions the jurors simply state there was no satisfactory reason for the shooting; the people had not threatened; the firing was unnecessary. Then in the most favorable case the charge reads manslaughter, and, if the matter is worse, murder. The officer who gave the order to fire is not protected by the command which he holds from above, the jury pronounce his guilt, and, according to civil law, he is either, in case of manslaughter, put in prison, or if murder he is hanged, and the same can occur to every soldier who fires with orders.

One does not believe that such can happen. I recall many cases where officers were found guilty by the jury; directly after, to be sure, they were pardoned by the ruler. Eventually, however, this will be of no assistance. At any rate our demand is throughout a just one. Further, I can describe an example of personal responsibility in Germany—an isolated one it is true; I mean the case of Gen. Vogel von Falkenstein, who at the outbreak of the last French war arrested our then existing party managers and allowed them to be imprisoned. At the end of the war procedure was begun against him by those who were wronged on this account, and, on the civil complaint, he was condemned by all courts of judicature to a considerable indemnity. That was in Braunschweig and there was no further result.

Further, we demand that there be universal military education. Substitution of militia for the standing army. This is the old demand of the social democracy, which was brought forward by Fichte in his "Speech on the German Nation." To-day we have a people with