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Socialism being now revolutionary social democracy, we should expect to find it most widely and most acutely developed in those countries where, 1st, the social condition of the lower classes is most precarious, or, in other words, where property and comfort are ill distributed; 2nd, where political democracy is already a matter of popular agitation; and, 3rd, where previous revolutions have left behind them an unquiet and revolutionary spirit—a "valetudinary habit," as Burke calls it, "of making the extreme medicine of the State its daily bread." That is very much what we do find. All these conditions are present in Germany—the country in which socialism has made the most remarkable and rapid advance. Dr. Engel, head of the Statistical Bureau of Prussia, states that in 1875 six million persons, representing, with their families, more than half the population of that State, had an income less than £21 a year each; and only 140,000 persons had incomes above £150. The number of landed proprietors is indeed comparatively large. In 1861 there were more than two millions of them out of a population of 23,000,000; and in a country where half the people are engaged in agriculture this would, at first sight, seem to offer some assurance of general comfort. But then the estates of most of them are much too small to keep them in regular employment or to furnish them with adequate maintenance. More than a million hold estates of less than three acres each, and averaging little over an acre, and the soil is poor. The consequence is that the small proprietor is almost always over head and ears in debt. His property can hardly be called his own, and he pays to the usurer a much larger sum annually as interest than he could rent the same land for in the open market. More than half of these small estates lie in the Rhine provinces alone, and the distressed condition of the peasantry there has been lately brought again before the attention of the legislature. But while thus in the west the agricultural population suffers seriously from the excessive subdivision of landed property, they are straitened in the eastern and northern provinces by their exclusion from it. Prince Bismarck, speaking of the spread of socialism in a purely agricultural district like Lauenburg, which had excited surprise, said that this would not seem remarkable to any one who reflected that, from the land legislation in that part of the country, the labourers could never hope to acquire the smallest spot of ground as their own possession, and were kept in a state of dependence on the gentry and the peasant proprietors. Half the land of Prussia is held by 31,000 persons; and emigration, which used to come chiefly from the eastern provinces, where subdivision had produced a large class of indigent proprietors, proceeds now predominantly from the quarters where large estates abound. The diminution of emigration from the Rhine provinces is indeed one cause of the increase of distress among the peasant proprietary; but why emigration has ceased, when there seems more motive for it, is not so clear. As yet, however, socialism has taken comparatively slight hold of the rural population of Germany, because they are too scattered in most parts to combine; but there exists in that country, as in others, a general conviction that the condition of the agricultural labourers is really a graver social question than the condition of the other industrial classes, and must be faced in most countries before long. Socialism has naturally made most way among the factory operatives of Germany, who enjoy greatest facilities for combination and mutual fermentation, and who besides, while better off in respect to wages than various other sections of workpeople, are yet the most improvident and discontented class in the community. Then, in considering the circumstances of the labouring classes in Germany, it must be remembered that, through customs and indirect taxation of different kinds, they pay a larger share of the public burdens than they do in some countries, and that the obligation of military service is felt to be so great a hardship that more than a third of the extensive emigration which now takes place every year from the German Empire is prompted by a desire to escape it. Before the establishment of the Empire, only about a tenth part of the emigrants left the country without an official permit; but the proportion has been rising every year since then, and sometimes comes to nearly a half.

Under these circumstances neither the strength nor the progress of the Social Democratic party in that country affords occasion for surprise. At the last general election, in February, 1890, this party polled more votes than any other single party in the Empire, and returned to the Imperial Diet a body of representatives strong enough, by skilful alliances, to exercise an effective influence on the course of affairs. The advance of the party may be seen in the increase of the socialist vote at the successive elections since the creation of the Empire.

In 1871 it was	101,927.
" 1874 "	351,670.
" 1877 "	493,447.
" 1878 "	437,438.
" 1881 "	311,961.
" 1884 "	549,000.
" 1887 "	774,128.
" 1890 "	1,427,000.

The effect of the coercive laws of 1878, as shown by these figures, is very noteworthy. In consequence of the successive attempts made in that year on the life of the Emperor William by two socialists, Hoedel and Nobiling, Prince Bismarck determined to stamp out the whole agitation with which the two criminals were connected by obtaining from the Diet exceptional and temporary powers of repression. The first effect of these measures was, as was natural, to disorganize the socialist party for the time. Hundreds of its leaders were expelled from the country; hundreds were thrown into prison or placed under police restriction; its clubs and newspapers were suppressed; it was not allowed to hold meetings, to make speeches, or to circulate literature of any kind. In the course of the twelve years during which this exceptional legislation has subsisted, it was stated at the recent Socialist Congress at Halle, that 155 socialist journals and 1200 books or pamphlets had been prohibited; 900 members of the party had been banished without trial; 1500 had been apprehended and 300 punished for contraventions of the Anti-Socialist Laws. These measures paralyzed the old organization sufficiently to reduce the Socialist vote at the next election in 1881 by thirty per cent.; but the party presently recovered its ground. It adapted itself to the new conditions, and established a secret propaganda which was manifestly quite as effective for its purposes as the old, and charged with more danger to the State. Its vote increased immensely at each successive election thereafter; and now, as Rodbertus prophesied, the social question has really proved "the Russian campaign of Bismarck's fame," for his policy of repression has ended in tripling the strength of the party it was designed to crush, and placing it in possession of one-fifth of the whole voting power of the nation. It was high time, therefore, to abandon so ineffectual a policy, and the socialist coercive laws expired on the 30th September, 1890, and the socialists inaugurated a new epoch of open and constitutional agitation by a general congress at Halle in the beginning of October.

The strength of the party in Parliament has never corresponded with its strength at the polls. In 1871 it returned only 1 member to the Diet; in 1874, 9; in 1877, 12; in 1878, 9; in 1881, 12; in 1884, 24; in 1887, 11; and in 1890, with an electoral vote which, under a system of proportional representation, would have secured for it 80 members, it has carried only 37. The party has no leaders now, in Parliament or out of it, of the intellectual rank of Lassalle or Marx; but it is very efficiently led. Its two chiefs, Liebknecht and Bebel, are well skilled both in debate and in management, and have for many years maintained their authority in a party peculiarly subject to jealousy and intrigue, and have consolidated its organization under very adverse conditions. Liebknecht, who is a journalist of most respectable talents, character, and acquirements, is now the veteran of the movement, having been out in the '48 and passed twelve years of political exile in London in constant intercourse with Karl Marx. Bebel, a turner in Leipzig, is a much younger man, and, indeed, is one of Liebknecht's converts, for he opposed the movement when it was first started in Leipzig by Lassalle; but he has fought so long and so stout a battle for his cause that he too seems now one of its veterans. The other parliamentary leaders of the party are for the most part still under thirty. Von Volmar, a military officer who has left the service for agitation and journalism, seems to be the older leaders' chief lieutenant; and Frohme, a young littérateur of repute, may be mentioned because he heads a tendency to more moderate policy.

Owing to the paucity of its representatives, the party has hitherto made little attempt to initiate legislation. No bill can be introduced into the German Diet unless it is backed by fifteen members; and, except in the Parliament of 1884–7, the Socialist party never had fifteen members until last February. The work of its parliamentary representatives, therefore, has consisted mainly of criticism and opposition, and seizing every suitable occasion for the ventilation of their general ideas; but after the election of 1884, when they returned to the Diet twenty-four strong, they introduced first a bill for the prohibition of Sunday labour, which was stoutly opposed by Prince Bismarck, and defeated; and second, a Labourer's Protection Bill, proposing to create an elaborate organization for securing the general wellbeing of the working class. It was to create, first, a new Labour Department of State; second, a series of Workmen's Chambers, one for every district of 200,000 or 400,000 inhabitants, with the necessary number of local auxiliaries; third, Local Courts of Conciliation for the settlement of differences between labourers and employers, from whose decision there should be an appeal to the Workmen's Chamber of the District. Both the Court of Conciliation and the Workmen's Chamber were to be composed of an equal number of employers and employed. The connection between the Workmen's Chambers of the District and the Minister of Labour would be through District Councils of Labour, the members of which were to be chosen by the minister out of a list presented by the Workmen's Chamber of the District, and containing twice the number of names required to fill the places. It was to be the duty of these Councils of Labour to send a report every year to the Labour Department in Berlin on the condition of labour in their respective districts after an annual inspection of all the factories, workshops, and industrial establishments of any kind located there. The Workmen's Chambers were to have a wide rôle, and were the keystone of the system. Besides being the courts of final appeal in labour disputes, they were to bring to the knowledge of the competent authorities the existence of any disorders or grievances that occurred in industrial life; to give advice on the best laws and regulations for industry; to undertake inquiries into all matters affecting the conditions of labour, treaties of commerce, taxes, rates of wages, technical education, housing, prices of subsistence, etc.

In introducing the bill, its promoters said a chief object of the whole organization was to obtain for working men higher wages for a shorter day's work, and they proposed the immediate reduction of the day of labour to eight hours for miners and ten hours for all other trades, together with some further limitations on the work of women and children, the abolition of prison work at ordinary trades, and of Sunday work, and the requirement of the payment of wages weekly, and their payment in money. The bill was referred to a committee of the House, and rejected, after that committee brought up an unfavourable report in February, 1886, and nothing further has been done in the matter since; but the Minister of the Interior was so much struck with the unexpectedly moderate and practical character of its proposals that he said if these proposals expressed the whole mind of the members who proposed them, then those members might as well sit on the right side of the House as on the left. The effect of the bill, as far as it was workable, would merely be to give the working class a real and systematic, but not unequal, voice in settling the conditions of their own labour; and its rejection is to some extent an example of the way the socialist agitation impedes the cause of labour by creating in the public mind an unnecessary distrust even of reasonable reforms.

There are some questions of general policy on which the socialist deputies take up a position of their own. They always oppose the military budget, because, like socialists everywhere, they are opposed to all war and armaments. Wars are merely quarrels of rulers, for peoples would make for peace, and armaments only drain the people's pockets in order to perpetuate the people's oppression. Then they are opposed to national debts, because national debts enable rulers to carry on war. They are opposed to the new colonization policy of the Empire, because in their opinion it is a policy of aggrandisement and conquest undertaken under hypocritical pretences. They are opposed to protective duties, because they dislike indirect taxation, as bearing always unjustly on the labouring class. They are strong supporters of popular education, but they opposed the new insurance laws because they feared these laws would place people too much under the power of the Government, for their jealousy of the Government that exists corrects their general partiality for Government control, and tends to keep them back even from some of the minor excesses of State-socialism.

The moderate and apparently temporizing policy of the deputies is a constant source of dissatisfaction to the wilder and more inexperienced members of the party, who complain, as they did at the recent Halle Congress, that trying to improve the present system of things is not the best way of subverting it, and who will either have socialism cum revolution, or they will have nothing at all. But the older heads merely smile, and tell them the hour for socialism and revolution is not yet, that no man knows when it shall be, and that in the meantime it would be mere folly for socialists to refuse the real comforts they can get because they think they have ideally a right to a great deal more. "Why," said Bebel, when he was charged at Halle with countenancing armaments in violation of socialist principles by voting for a better uniform to the soldiers—"why, there are numbers of Social Democrats in the Reserve, and was I to let them die through inadequate clothing merely because I object to armaments as a general principle?"

They of course think of this policy of accommodation as only a temporary necessity, till they become strong enough to be thoroughgoing; but there is perhaps better reason to believe it to be an abiding and growing necessity of their position, for they are finding themselves more and more obliged, if they are to become stronger at all, or even to keep the strength they have, to bid for the support of aggrieved classes by working for the immediate removal of their grievances, and thus to keep on reducing day by day as it rises the volume of that social discontent which is to turn the wheel of revolution. It is not unlikely that the socialist party, now that it is sufficiently powerful to do something in the legislature, but not sufficiently powerful to think of final social transformation, will occupy themselves much more completely with those miscellaneous social reforms in the immediate future; that they will thereby become every day better acquainted with the real conditions on which social improvement depends; that they will find more and more satisfying employment in the exercise of their power of securing palpable, practical benefits, than in agitating uncertain theoretical schemes; and, in short, that they will settle permanently into what they are for the present to some extent temporarily, a moderate labour party, working for the real remedy of real grievances by the means best adapted, under real conditions, national or political, for effecting the purpose.

The programme of the party, which was adopted at the Gotha Congress of 1875, after the union of the Marxist socialists and the Lassalleans, and has remained unaltered ever since, has always consisted of a deferred part and an actual. It contains, in fact, three programmes—the programme for to-day, the programme for to-morrow, and the programme for the day after to-morrow. The last is of course the socialist State of the future, at present beyond our horizon altogether. Before it appears there is to be a more or less prolonged period in which individual management of industry is to be gradually superseded by co-operative societies founded on State credit; but this intermediate state was only made an article of the programme to conciliate the Lassalleans, and one hears less of productive associations to-day from the German socialists than from the French. The Germans would apparently prefer to go from private property to public property direct rather than go viâ corporate property; but in any case their programme leaves the creation of productive societies to a future period, and their task for the present is to secure for working men factory and sanitary legislation, constitutional liberties, and an easier and more equitable system of taxation.

The programme is as follows:—

"I. Labour is the source of all wealth and civilization, and since productive labour as a whole is made possible only in and through society, the entire produce of labour belongs to society, that is, it belongs by an equal right to all its members, each according to his reasonable needs, upon condition of a universal obligation to labour.

"In existing society the instruments of labour are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the dependence of the labouring class which results therefrom is the cause of misery and servitude in all forms.

"The emancipation of labour requires the conversion of the instruments of labour into the common property of society, and the management of labour by association, and the application of the product with a view to the general good and an equitable distribution.

"The emancipation of labour must be the work of the labouring class, in relation to which all other classes are only a reactionary mass.

"II. Starting from these principles, the Socialistic Labour Party of Germany seeks by all lawful means to establish a free State and a socialistic society, to break asunder the iron law of wages by the abolition of the system of wage-labour, the suppression of every form of exploitation, and the correction of all political and social inequality.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany, although at first working within national limits, is sensible of the international character of the labour movement, and resolved to fulfil all the duties thereby laid on working men, in order to realize the brotherhood of all men.

"The Socialistic Labour Party of Germany demands, in order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the establishment by State help of socialistic productive associations under the democratic control of the workpeople. Productive associations for industry and agriculture should be created to such an extent that the socialistic organization of all labour may arise out of them.