ermitted, when one is obliged by
circumstances, to take an oath to authorities whose right and might the
oath-taker does not admit. So long ago as 1892 the Social Democrats were
publicly charged with condoning perjury in order to rescue fellow
members from the results of breaches of the law. Judge Schmidt in a
court at Breslau said in that year: "Social Democrats have never
concealed the fact that they are hostile to any religious form of oath.
For them the religious importance and responsibility of an oath has no
meaning whatever." Numerous German judges and authors have expressed
themselves in a similar strain.

Readers who are interested in the point are referred to the report[67]
of the Socialist Congress held in Berlin, October, 1892. The party
leaders endeavoured to gloss the matter over with righteous indignation
and ambiguous phrases, but it nevertheless remains a fact that the
desire to counteract effectively, a tendency to perjury among Socialists
led the German Government a few years later to make perjury punishable
by penal servitude up to ten years.

[Footnote 67: All these reports may be seen in the British Museum
Reading Room. Press mark is: 08072d.]

Before leaving the _Volksstaat_ the author only wishes to state that it
lays the axe on every conception of morality, religion and social order
which we esteem. In the place of existing conditions, it would erect a
mob tyranny more degrading to the individual than Czarism or
Republicanism. The mines of Siberia and the tinned-meat factories of
Chicago may enslave the body, but the _Volksstaat_, as portrayed by
Socialist writers and speakers, promises an intellectual
tyranny--hopeless alike to body and soul; and those who have had an
opportunity to observe the brutal tyranny called "party discipline"
which rules the German Social Democrats, will bear the present writer
out in saying that its like, could only be found inside the German army.

The strongest, best organized and most thoroughly disciplined political
party in the world has repeatedly expressed its unalterable
determination to place national before international interests, whenever
these two should seem to be at variance. In the light of these
declarations, the action of German Socialists in giving unreserved
support to the German Government in this war, is not altogether
surprising.

Furthermore, this foundation-stone in their policy ought never to have
been left out of consideration when pon