[2] Enthüllungen, Introduction, p. 11.
[3] P. 47.
[4] For the official documents connected with the International, see R. Meyer’s Emancipationskampf des vierten Standes, vol. i. 2nd ed.
[5] Oscar Testu, L’Internationale, p. 153.
[6] Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich.

CHAPTER IX
THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

To understand the modern development of Germany, we must recall a few of the leading facts of its history. German history is largely a record of disunion, and this became chronic at the Reformation, which divided the country between two conflicting forms of religion. The religious struggle had its culmination and its catastrophe in the Thirty Years’ War.

Seldom, if ever, in the history of the world, has a calamity so awful befallen a people so highly endowed and so well fitted to excel in all the paths of progress. In every respect—economical, political, and moral—Germany in the Thirty Years’ War received wounds from which she has hardly recovered even to-day. Division and weakness at home invited interference and aggression from abroad. For generations it was the corner-stone of French policy to foster the divisions of Germany, and so to maintain her supremacy in Western Europe.

The victories of the Great Frederick, the works of her great writers—Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, and of her great philosophers—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and the mighty struggles of the War of Liberation in 1813, did much to restore the national consciousness of Germany. But the disunion continued, and in her industrial organisation she was far behind England and France. Feudalism survived, especially in the regions east of the Elbe, far into the nineteenth century. The power-loom was not introduced, even into the more progressive Rhine country, till the middle of the nineteenth century.

The results of the War of Liberation were, for the German people, most disappointing. After throwing off the French yoke, citizen and peasant alike found that the enthusiasm and devotion with which they had spent blood and treasure had been in vain. The German princes took to themselves all the fruits of victory, and the old abuses continued to flourish under the old régime. The only considerable reforms were those which had been established in the Rhine country by the hereditary enemy, the French, and which the German reaction did not venture to abolish.