ABSTRACT

The Iron Chancellor, with all the power of State and society in his hands, had capitulated before the moral force and mass power of the German working class. In any case, here it is, "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority", already with its eleven million voters and its fifty million souls. It has slowly, patiently, painfully toiled up to a height where it is beginning to see visions of victory. Every phase of the labor movement has arisen in response to actual material needs. In adopting, the methods of education, of organization, and of political action the socialists rest their case upon the decision of democracy. They accept the weapons that civilization has put into their hands, and they are testing the word of kings and of parliaments that democracy can, if it wishes, alter the bases of society.