to
Bismarck. Von Schweitzer, as the successor of Lassalle at the head of
the Universal Working Men's Association, occupied a powerful position,
and the quarrels between the various elements in the labor movement were
at this time almost fatal to the cause. However, various representatives
of the working class already sat in Parliament, and among them were
Bebel and Liebknecht.

The exposures of Liebknecht and Bebel proved not only ruinous to Von
Schweitzer, but excessively annoying to Bismarck, and as early as 1871
he wanted to begin a war upon the Marxian socialists. In 1874 he
actually began his attempts to crush what he could no longer corrupt or
control. He became more and more enraged at the attitude of the
socialists toward him personally. Moreover, they were no longer
advocating cooeperative associations subsidized by the State; they were
now propagating everywhere republican and socialist ideas. He tried in
various ways to rid the country of the two chief malcontents, Bebel and
Liebknecht, but even their arrests seemed only to add to their fame and
to spread more throughout the masses their revolutionary views. He says
himself that he was awakened to the iniquity of their doctrines when
they defended the republican principles of the Paris workmen in 1871. At
his trial in 1872 Liebknecht stated with perfect frankness his
republican principles. "Gentlemen Judges and Jurors, I do not disown my
past, my principles, and my convictions. I deny nothing; I conceal
nothing. And, in order to show that I am an adversary of monarchy and of
present society, and that when duty calls me I do not recoil before the
struggle, there was truly no need of the foolish inventions of the
policemen of Giessen. I say here freely and openly: _Since I have been
capable of thinking I have been a republican, and I shall die a
republican._[24] ... If I have had to undergo unheard of persecutions
and if I am poor, that is nothing to be ashamed of--no, I am proud of
it, for that is the most eloquent witness of my political integrity.
Yet, once more, I am not a conspirator by profession. _Call me, if you
will, a soldier of the Revolution--I do not object to that._

"From my youth a double ideal has soared above me: Germany free and
united and the emancipation of the working people, that is to say, the
suppression of class domination, which is synonymous with the
liberation of humanity. For this double end I have struggled with all my
strength,