So the Independents having committed hari-kari and the Spartacists being hoist with their own petard, middle-class and moderate Germany heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped that the bogey of Bolshevism was buried. The elections to the National Assembly were held a few days later without disturbance, and the German revolution entered its third and last phase.
The German revolution which began in November—in old German the "Month of Fogs"—and ended in February—the "Month of Fools"—was fogged from the beginning and fooled to the end. Its third and last phase began about the middle of January with the establishing of provisional government by the moderate Majority Socialists, the crushing of Spartacus, and the elections. The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. But the Independents had missed their opportunity of seizing power and securing such foreign support for the revolution as they had earned by their attitude on the war. Their subsequent policy of obstruction had as little success as it deserved.
By the middle of February, when the new Government was proclaimed at Weimar, a communist revolution had been converted into a constitutionalist reconstruction; and that this corresponded with the desire of the majority of the people was shown by the election result. Every man and woman over twenty was entitled to vote, and a high percentage did so; while the system of proportional representation employed, whatever its defects, at least gave a fair numerical representation of the party presentments of public opinion. As in the English election, nationalism decided the issue in favour of the party in power. The Independent opposition was discredited by Bolshevism, the Conservative opposition by Kaiserism. Apart from the women the Social-Democrats would probably have had an independent majority; but, as was shown by the Pfalz results in which the women's voices were kept separate, they were more conservative and clerical than the men. As it was, the Majority Socialists with 163 out of 423 members were forced into alliance, not with the Independent Socialists who had only 22 votes, but with the Democratic Liberals who had 75. And as this relieved them of all responsibility to the revolution there was no reason why they should not further strengthen their parliamentary position by taking in the Clerical Centre with its 55 votes as well. And thus Germany got from losing the war a coalition as strong parliamentarily and as weak politically as that which winning the war gave to us.
While the revolution was being side-tracked in Parliament, it was being sandbagged in the Proletariat. A division of Frei-Corps with all the machinery of modern war, tanks, aeroplanes, etc., was sent against the north-western coast ports where the revolution had originated and where Spartacus was pursuing its policy of aggravating the food difficulty by preventing the sailing of food ships as arranged under the armistice. Bremen was entered by force, after fighting; and the other towns opened negotiations. On the eastern frontier a front was formed against the Poles, who had occupied nearly all Posen province, and fighting continued until the Allies stopped it. Great efforts were made to get together some sort of effective force as a basis for government; and the resultant Frei-Corps, though at this early date still few and inferior, were already enough to give check to the "Bolshevist" menace within and without the frontier. Meantime the whole "soviet" system of councils was practically 'frozen out' and politically 'snowed under.' The Central Council was got to abdicate in favour of the Constituent Assembly: the Socialisation Commission to which execution of the economic revolution had been referred, resigned re infecta: while the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils were quietly ignored. A Provisional Constitution was published in which all ideas of a centralised Socialist republic were abandoned, and the federal Reich was restored with the substitution of presidents for princes. Finally the seat of the Assembly was transferred to Weimar, professedly to steep it in the sedative atmosphere of the old pre-Prussian "Kultur" of the philosophers and poets, and practically to withdraw it from the too stimulating atmosphere of Berlin, which was still an Independent stronghold. Even so might a demoralised and democratised England placate a victorious and Victorian America by transferring parliament to the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
All these strong measures were really signs of weakness. Spartacus had to be put down to please the Allies, the Poles pushed back to please the nationalists, the Clericals bribed with Government posts to counteract French bids for their support in separatist intrigues. The constitution had to conciliate particularist sentiment in Prussia and the southern principalities because this sentiment prevailed in the general exhaustion of national and revolutionary forces. The old driving power of national sentiment, so much abused during the war and that might still have been called on for a desperate national defence, was worn out. The new energy of the revolution had been wasted; and the country, so far as its government was concerned, was back where it was when the revolution broke out, materially much the worse for its three months' excursion into revolution. In a word, the spirit of the new German Government was diplomatic not democratic. The revolution had come full circle and the Scheidemann Government of April might have been the Government of Max von Baden of six months before.
Morally, however, it was not the old Germany that had bowed before the "forty-seven Princes hats." It had brought back with it from the perilous peaks and bottomless abysses of revolution a wider outlook and a deeper insight. And if it returned from its adventure only more weary and wasted it had at least learned to lift up its eyes to the hills.