mocrats into an extreme position and then to hold them up as a terrible
example of what democracy means. "This," they can tell the German people,
"is the alternative to Prussian rule." A dangerous policy, it may be
argued, for the Social Democrats may some day secure a majority in the
Reichstag. The Prussian answer to this is that, without a redistribution
of seats, this is barely conceivable; and that, were it to take place,
the Reichstag would promptly be dissolved for new elections on a narrower
franchise. Bismarck himself contemplated this course, and his successors
would not shrink from it.

Another reason why it has been possible for the Government to ignore the
Social Democrats has been the absence of a practical alternative programme
on the part of the Social Democrats themselves. "If I had to make out a
school report for the Social Democratic Movement," said Prince Buelow in
the Reichstag on one occasion, "I should say, 'Criticism, agitation,
discipline, and self-sacrifice, I. _a_; positive achievements, lucidity of
programme, V. _b._'" The taunt is not undeserved. The Socialist Movement
in Germany has suffered, like so many German movements, through a rigid
adherence to logical theories. Under the leadership of old revolutionary
thinkers like Bebel it has failed to adapt itself to the facts of modern
German life. The vague phrases of its republican programme, survivals from
a past epoch of European thought, have attracted to it a large mass of
inarticulate discontent which it has never been able to weld into a party
of practical reformers. In the municipal sphere and in the field of Trade
Unionism, under the education of responsibility, German Socialism can show
great achievements; but in national policy it has been as helpless as the
rest of the German nation.

What effect, it will be asked, is the war of 1914 likely to have on the
German working-class movement? In 1848 middle-class Germany made its stand
for democracy. May we hope for a similar and more successful movement,
in the direction of Western ideals and methods of government, from
working-class Germany as a result of 1914?

It is a tempting prophecy; but the outlook is not propitious. Germany,
Prussian and South German, noble, bourgeois, and working class, has rallied
round the Emperor in this crisis of national history, as the brutal and
cynical directors of German policy calculated that she would. For the
Social Democratic Movement the war comes