At a nearby dramshop they jointly purchased a jugful of beer; then took it home, lit the lamp, and began their conversation.
It turned particularly on a new tax bill, which would add another serious burden to those under which the working classes were groaning. The aim was to gain as many opponents to it as possible, so that at the last reading in the Reichstag an overwhelming majority could be secured against the measure, sufficient to bring about its defeat.
The two friends were engaged in eager discussion until after midnight. When they parted they had reached perfect agreement.
On the day following Schmitz was in a state of feverish agitation. It seemed strange to him, after all. But a short while ago he was wearing the “king’s coat.” A short twelvemonth previously he had been a soldier of the Kaiser’s,—a man sworn to defend the fatherland and to aid and further its interests,—and to-day?—to-day he was one of those who are accused of shaking the foundations of the state edifice, those who are aiming to erect a new commonwealth more in consonance with their own ideas and interests.
But when he on the same evening ascended the speaker’s stand, carrying himself erect as a freeman, and when a crowd of many hundreds welcomed the new comrade with enthusiastic shouts, he felt differently. Even before he had said a word to his new friends they saluted him joyously as one of themselves,—as one to bring about the new millennium,—and his confidence in himself grew apace, and a mighty longing to achieve fame in this new army clutched his soul. It was his full intention to please this heterogeneous mass of men; he meant to force them into the circle of his own conceptions and beliefs, so that all of them should follow him, without a will of their own, as sheep follow a shepherd.
And he began his address. He first described the provisions of this new bill, and then laid bare the consequences to the laboring multitude that the adoption of such a measure would have.
A new tax, he explained, meant a further step in the pauperization of the masses. He showed that this new tax was a superfluity, provided the attempt was abandoned by the government to increase still further the strength of the army.
“Gigantic sums of money are annually wasted by the government for the military,” said he, in a ringing voice. “Scarcely have millions upon millions been voted for the introduction of new rifles and new guns; scarcely have new regiments been formed and the conformation of existing ones altered, when all these measures are found to be worse than useless. Errors of calculation are discovered when it is too late to retrieve them, and new sums of enormous size are demanded in order to overcome innovations conceived in haste and executed without judgment.
“Germany’s reputation and her power in the world have been won by the army, and it is her army which neighbors begrudge us. But have we not arrived on the summit of military power? Must we extend militarism to the point where it smothers and throttles all other organs of the state machine?
“If we but devoted to other institutions of the empire a modest portion of the untold money that is swallowed up every year by the army, there would be no necessity for laying tax upon tax upon the citizens until what remains to them of the fruits of their labor hardly suffices for bare needs. If we did that, we should be a wealthy country; the citizen would acquire material wellbeing. Industry would revive and yield to the people all its blessings. But if it is not intended to cease favoring the army to such an unreasonable extent, let them take the money needed from the pockets of those who are spending their days in sloth and wilful luxury. As it is, the wealthy are not burdened any more than the poor laborer, while the latter really has to surrender a portion of the scant bread he has earned for himself and his family to maintain a state of things in which capital enjoys all those advantages which are denied to him.