William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

In 1892, to anticipate by a year or two, in reply to a guest who had observed that Social Democrats were not decreasing in numbers, the Emperor remarked:

"The moment the Social Democracy feels itself in possession of power it will not hesitate for an instant to attack the Burghertum (middle classes) very energetically. No exhibition of general benevolence is of any use against these people—here only religious feeling, founded on decided faith, can have any influence."

The Emperor, referring to the murder of a manufacturer in Mulhausen, said: "Another victim to the revolutionary movement kept alive by the Socialists. If only our people would act like men!"

And yet it is obvious, looking at it from the standpoint of to-day, that an admirably organized movement with four million parliamentary voters in an electorate of fourteen millions, with no members in an Imperial Parliament of 397 with representatives, more or less numerous, on almost every municipal board of any importance in the Empire, with the power of disturbing at any moment the relations between capital and labour, upon which the prosperity, security, and comfort of the whole population depend, and in intimate relations with the Socialists of all other countries, cannot be merely ignored or disposed of by scornful and sarcastic speeches, by official anathema, or even by close police supervision. There must be something behind it all which ought to be susceptible of explanation.

Before, however, attempting to conjecture what the something is, it will be advisable, familiar to many though the facts must be, to recapitulate, as briefly as possible, the history of the movement. Old as the story is, it is necessary to have some knowledge of it, for Social Democracy is the great, perhaps the only, domestic political thorn in the Emperor's side.

It is a truism to say that the "social question," the question how best to organize society, is as old as society itself. Great thinkers all down the ages, from Plato to Sir Thomas More, from More to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Rousseau to Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Lassalle, and Karl Marx, have devoted their attention to it. The French Revolutionists tried to solve it, and the revolutionary movement of 1848 took up the problem in its turn.

German Social Democracy may be referred for its source to the teachings of Louis Blanc, who formed in 1840 a workmen's society in Paris. Blanc held, as the Social Democrats hold, that capitalism was the cause of all social evil, and that the workman was powerless against it. He therefore proposed the establishment of workmen's societies for purposes of production, and the grant of the necessary capital at a low rate of interest by the State. The doctrine was taken up in Germany with fiery enthusiasm by Ferdinand Lassalle, who, in May, 1863, founded the General German Workmen's Society for a "peaceful, lawful agitation" in favour of universal suffrage as a first means to the desired end. Universal suffrage was granted by the North German Confederation in 1867, and in 1873 Lassalle's adherents numbered 60,000.

Meanwhile, Karl Marx and his disciple, Frederic Engels, had been propagating their theories, and in 1848 the former published his famous work on the ideal social state. At first Marx was a partizan of revolutionary methods, but he subsequently recanted this view and proclaimed that the Socialistic aim in future should be the "strengthening of the economic and political power of the workman so that the expropriation of private property could be obtained by legislation." The Marxian doctrine was adopted in Germany by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, who, at Eisenach in 1869, founded the Association of Social Democratic Workmen, to which the present German party owes its name. The Eisenach programme declared "the economic dependence of the workmen on the monopolists of the tools of labour the foundation of servitude and social evil," and demanded "the economic emancipation of the working classes." An attempt to get the Lassalle society to join the Eisenacher society on an international basis failed for the time, but the two associations finally coalesced at the Gotha Congress of 1875.

The attempt on the life of William I in 1878 by the anarchist Nobiling had an important effect on the fortunes of the party and the character of its programme. The Socialist Laws were passed and the police began a campaign against the Socialists, of which the mildest features were the dissolution of societies, the searching of houses, the expulsion of suspected persons, and the interdiction of Socialist newspapers and periodicals.

For the next few years the party held its annual congresses in Switzerland or Denmark, but as the Socialist Laws ceased to have effect after three years, and were not then renewed, the party resumed its congresses in Germany. The Congress at Erfurt in 1891 resulted in the issue of a new programme rejecting the Lassalle plan for the establishment of workmen's societies for productive purposes and substituting for it the transfer of all capitalistic private property engaged in the means of production, such as lands, mines, raw material, tools, machinery, and means of transport, to the State. The term used in the programme is "state," not "society," but the State is in fact nothing but the society armed with coercive powers.