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 subsequen