Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/66

 The security against lack of employment belongs, however, in the dreamland of "the right to work."

In the beginning of his rising power Prince Bismarck said to the advancing bourgeoisie: "lectore si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. (If I am not able to bend the high I will move the Acheron.) If I cannot deal with you, the party of progress, and the liberals, then I will conjure with the proletariat; I will move the Acheron; I will unchain against you the socialist movement."Prince Bismarck called, but the Acheron, the German proletariat, did not move! Proffers were made to us. They were contemptuously sent back. Then the social democracy called and the Acheron, the German labor movement, arose, and the German labor power, as far as it is class conscious, united and with one mind marches under the banner of social democracy as in no other country of the earth. What Prince Bismarck could not do the social democracy has accomplished. It was stronger than he and along the whole line the social democracy stands as victor over the Bismarckian system.

Mention has been made of the "iron law of evolution." And it is an iron law. No one can alter it, bend or break it by force, and Prince Bismarck, who disposed of all the means of power in the state and society, who said of himself, "I am the realm; I am the state"—and who said it more truly of himself than did the king of France—he is to-day crushed to the earth, while state and society are yet here. Nothing has essentially been altered; a man less on the political stage and nothing further; one man overboard. The social democracy recognizes that, as little as Prince Bismarck could alter the laws of progress, even as little can we alter them. We know that industrial society, do what it will, hastens to destruction. It is like an ancient tragedy of fate—the hero knows he is condemned to be the sacrifice.