(2) Misleading information about the Party I have not given out. The Social-Democratic Deputies in the Reichstag, who are not the proper authorities for such decisions, voted down my motion to postpone making any decision on this point until a thorough discussion had taken place.
Karl Liebknecht.
A NEW YEAR'S GREETING TO ENGLAND
I am pleased to be able to write a message of brotherhood to British Socialists at a time when the ruling classes of Germany and Great Britain are trying by all means in their power to incite bloodthirsty hatred between the two peoples. But it is painful for me to write these lines at a time when our radiant hope of previous days—the Socialist International—lies destroyed on the ground with a thousand expectations, when even many Socialists in the belligerent countries—for Germany is not an exception—have in this most rapacious of all wars of robbery willingly put on the yoke of the chariot of Imperialism, just when the evils of capitalism were becoming more apparent than ever. I am, however, particularly proud and happy to send my greetings to you, to the British Independent Labour Party, who, with our Russian and Servian comrades, have saved the honor of Socialism amidst the madness of national slaughter.
Confusion reigns among the rank and file of the Socialist Army and many blame Socialist principles for our present failure. It is not our principles which have failed, however, but the representatives of those principles. It is not a question of changing our principles, it is a question of applying them to life, of carrying them into action.
All the phrases of "national defense" and the "liberation of the people" with which Imperialism decorates its instruments of murder are but deceiving tinsel. Each Socialist Party has its enemy, the common enemy of the International, in its own country. There it has to fight it. The liberation of each nation must be its own work.
Only blindness can order the continuation of the slaughter until the "enemy" is crushed. The well-being of all nations is inseparably connected; the struggle of the organized working class can only be carried out internationally.