The Austro-Hungarian Government saw the trend of events. Premier Baron Burian told Berlin that the Dual Monarchy could not keep up the struggle much longer. The people, he said, were starving, and disloyalty and treachery on the part of subject non-German races in Hungary, Bohemia and the Slav population had attained alarming proportions.
"If the rulers do not make peace the people will make it over their heads," said the Premier, "and that will be the end of rulers."
He appealed to Germany to join with Austria-Hungary in making an offer of peace. Berlin counseled against such a step. The German Government had long lost any illusions it might have cherished in respect to Austria-Hungary's value as an ally, and it was fully informed of the desperateness of the situation there. Despite this it realized that such a step as Vienna proposed would be taken by the enemy as a confession of weakness, and it clung desperately to the hope that the situation on the west front might still be saved.
Burian, however, cherished no illusions. Austria asked for peace, but made it clear that she did not mean a separate peace. The German people saw in Vienna's action the shadow of coming events, and their despondency was increased.
Prince Lichnowsky, Germany's Ambassador at the Court of St. James at the out-break of the war, had earlier confided to a few personal friends copies of his memoirs regarding the events leading up to the war. Captain von Beerfelde of the German General Staff, into whose hands a copy came, had a number of copies made and circulated them generally. The memoirs were a frank disclosure of Germany's great share of the guilt for the war. The authorities tried to stop their circulation, but they were read by hundreds of thousands, and did much to destroy general confidence in the justice of Germany's cause.
Count Hertling, trying blunderingly to redeem his democratic promises, made a tactlessly naïve speech in the Prussian House of Lords in favor of the government's franchise-reform measures. These bills, although representing a decided improvement of the existing system, had been bitterly criticized by all liberal elements because they did not go far enough, but had finally been reluctantly accepted as the best that could be hoped for in the circumstances. A majority existed for them in the Prussian Diet, but the Junkers and noble industrialists of the House of Lords would hear of no surrender of their ancient rights and privileges. The Chancellor in his speech warned the Lords that they could avoid the necessity of making still more far-reaching concessions later by adopting the government's measures as they stood. To reject them, he declared, would be seriously to imperil the crown and dynasty. He closed with an appeal to his hearers to remember the services rendered to the Fatherland by men of all political creeds, including the Socialists.
Count Hertling's speech displeased everybody. The Conservative press assailed him bitterly. The Deutsche Tageszeitung, chief organ of the Junkers, called him "the gravedigger of the Prussian monarchy." The Kreuzzeitung charged him with minimizing the crown's deserts and exaggerating the services of the Socialists. The liberal bourgeois and the Socialist press said in effect: "And so this is our new democratic Chancellor who advises the House of Lords to block an honest democratic reform of Prussia's iniquitous franchise system." The Germania, chief organ of the Clericals, Hertling's own party, damned the speech with faint praise.
Talk of a "chancellor crisis" was soon heard, and by the middle of September there was little doubt that Hertling's days were numbered. Nothing else can so adequately indicate the reversal of conditions in Germany as the fact that one of the men named oftenest even in bourgeois circles as a likely successor to Count Hertling was Philip Scheidemann, a leader of the Majority Socialists. The vaterlandslose Gesellen were coming into their own.
The crisis became acute on September 20th. The government unofficially sounded the Majority Socialists as to their willingness to participate in a coalition government. The question was discussed on September 22d, at a joint conference of the Socialist Reichstag deputies and the members of the party's executive committee. Although one of the cardinal tenets of Socialism had always forbidden participation in any but a purely Socialist government, the final vote was nearly four to one in favor of abandoning this tenet in view of the extraordinary situation confronting the empire. With eighty votes against twenty-two the conference decided to send representatives into a coalition government under the following conditions:
1. The government shall unqualifiedly accept the declaration of the Reichstag of July 19, 1917, [18] and declare its willingness to enter a League of Nations whose fundamental principles shall be the peaceful adjustment of all conflicts and universal disarmament.