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That event will be of historic importance in establishing how public opinion in Germany during the war has been ruthlessly trampled under foot. The Reichstag has practically nothing to do with the conduct of the war. Up, practically, to the beginning of 1916 the sporadic Social Democratic opposition to the war, mainly by Dr. Liebknecht, was ignored by the Government.
Potsdam's representative in the Reichstag is at last effectually muzzled, but in the muzzling I have seen the German Government at work on a task almost as prodigious as the one it now faces on the Somme the task of keeping the German people deaf, dumb, and blind. Of what has meantime happened to Liebknecht the main facts are known.
Hence anyone reading the Workers Republic could have noticed whole passages that might have been taken direct from the German Socialist Liebknecht. "Recently we have been pondering deeply over the ties that bind this country to England.
I saved the place from being looted in the November excitement. Have you seen the Kaiser Salle? His Majesty dined there once. A witless popinjay. Liebknecht is a man. Flames in his heart. But a poor orator. He will be killed. They must kill him. A little Jew, Haase, has brains. You will meet him. And the Dadaists they know how to laugh. The cult of the absurd.
"We have perceived that Socialism and democracy are inseparable," declared William Liebknecht, the well-beloved, in 1899. Thirty years earlier, in 1869, he had given lucid expression to the same conviction in these words: "Socialism and democracy are not the same, but they are only different expressions of the same fundamental idea.
They're behind the bars, but still cussing the Government. You've got to respect fighters like that Liebknecht the Germans killed, and that Rosa What's-Her-Name. They were game. But you people, you try to put on all their airs without taking their chances.
During the Chancellor's speech, Liebknecht interrupted him and said that the Germans were not free; next he denied that the Germans had not wished war; and, another time, he called attention to the attempts of the Germans to induce the Mohammedan and Irish prisoners of war to desert to the German side.
Liebknecht was in prison but there was a little group of radicals who had not forgotten it. They wanted the Socialist party as a whole to do something to free Liebknecht. The party had been split before the advance of last summer so efforts were made to unite the two factions.
There are two effective replies to this curious Anglo-Saxon misunderstanding of Germany. The first is that Liebknecht had not, and has not, the support of his own party; the second, that were that party twice as numerous as it is its votes would be worthless in view of the power wielded by the Kaiser's representative, von Bethmann-Hollweg, backed up by the Federal Council.
How our hearts have warmed to Liebknecht! The realignment of nations must work to the same end. War, like politics, makes strange bed-fellows. Germany and Austria, for centuries rivals, and, at times, enemies, we behold united so completely that it is difficult to imagine them disentangled after the War. France and England, long regarding each other as natural enemies, are fused heart and soul.
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