Germany in Revolution

The German revolution was long preparing, and, like other great events, it cast its shadow far before. In one of several peace appeals which Russia addressed to the Central Powers before the abdication of the Tsar, the government at Petrograd cautioned: ‘Every day that peace is postponed contains an added threat to the security of the European dynasties.’ Count Czernin, Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, said in a memorandum to Emperor Charles in April, 1917: —

‘I cannot pass over a topic which gives its supreme emphasis to my whole argument. This is the danger of revolution, which is lowering over the horizon of all Europe. Five monarchs already have lost their thrones in this war, and the appalling ease with which the most powerful monarch in the world has been overthrown may encourage people to ponder the proverb, Exempla trahunt. It is not enough to say that conditions are different in Germany and Austria-Hungary. … The war has opened a new era in history. It has no previous examples and recognizes no precedents. The world is no longer the same world that it was three years ago, and we seek in vain for analogies in past history for events that have now become everyday occurrences. Any statesman who is not blind or deaf must appreciate that the stupid despair of the people is growing daily. He must hear the deep growl of dissatisfaction among the masses, and if he has any sense of responsibility he must take the situation into account. … I am thoroughly impressed with the conviction that, if Germany should try to conduct another winter campaign, revolutionary disturbances would occur in that country.’

The last prediction came true; for the first overt acts of revolution were the political strikes in Austria, Hungary, and Germany the following winter. The Bolshevist overturn in Russia, and the withdrawal of that country from the war, had encouraged the common people of the Central Powers to hope for steady peace. When this hope was disappointed by the interruption of negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, late in December, 1917, popular protest expressed itself by acts. Strikes started in Vienna on January 16, spread over Austria and Budapest within forty-eight hours, and came to a head in Berlin and throughout Germany ten days later. Work ceased in all industries; the fires of furnaces died down; the wheels of munitions works were still; newspapers could not appear; hotels and restaurants were without service. These demonstrations were political rather than economic, and were planned to last but a few days.

Radical Socialists were the prime movers, while government Socialists and trade-union leaders held aloof. Evidences of Russian Bolshevist propaganda were already apparent. The governments promised reforms until their people returned to work, and then used conventional reactionary methods to punish the principal agitators.

Spring came, bringing formal peace with Russia, warmth and sunshine, and the promise of a successful offensive in the West. But deep in the hearts of the common people were bitterness and discontent. Subsequent military reverses merely released the flood. The Kaiser’s September speech at Essen was the frightened plea of a monarch already cowering before the rising tide of popular wrath, which had withdrawn for a moment, only to return with overwhelming force.

While revolutionary sentiment was diffused throughout the Central Powers, the acute foci were in industrial centres and the army and navy. Army disaffection was particularly strong among replacement troops and reserves in garrisons. As early as 1915, furloughed soldiers from manufacturing towns employed their excursions into the country for provisions to spread revolutionary propaganda among the peasants. Convalescents returning to duty were disaffected; for revolutionary teaching found fertile soil in army hospitals and other centres of discouragement and morbidity. Thousands of former prisoners who came back from Russia after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk poured a stream of Bolshevist doctrine into the Western trenches. Replacement troops of the later classes were young men who had attained maturity during the past four years. They had grown up in an atmosphere of war demoralization. Many of them had earned high wages and led undisciplined lives in crowded cities. They had no stomach for the hardships and dangers of the front.

Consequently, soldiers courted sentences to the guard-house, organized secret societies, with such names as ‘We want to live,’ in order to assist each other in evading duty, and established underground railways to facilitate desertion.

Germany’s officer losses were very heavy. In proportion to the number in service, three times as many Prussian commissioned officers as privates were killed and five times as many wounded. The result was a dearth of competent leaders. Inferior and immature men—‘boys from the school-bench’—were placed in command of veteran troops. Their incompetence destroyed the confidence and undermined the loyalty of the rank and file. Distrust of the government spread apace. A growing fraction of the army felt that it had been intentionally deceived as to the true causes and issues of the war, and a sense of moral betrayal weakened its devotion to duty.

The spreading spirit of resentment and revolt was carried from the navy to the army by the practice of sentencing mutinous sailors to the trenches. It was conveyed from industrial centres to the army by the custom of sentencing strikers and labor-agitators to service at the front. Last summer, furloughed navy men flocked to the lines behind the battle-area, ostensibly to visit relatives, but really—according to present reports—to promote a revolutionary understanding between the army and the fleet.

In the navy itself disaffection was more acute and of longer standing than among the land forces. It began before the war, and was fostered by abuses peculiar to naval conditions. The men resented the harsh discipline and over-bearing manner of their officers. They saw the latter enjoy relatively sumptuous fare, while common soldiers were confined to a monotonous and limited war-diet. ‘One abuse that aroused great bitterness,’ according to Captain Persius, ‘was the fact that officers appropriated food for their families that was intended for the men, and sent considerable quantities off the vessels.’ While on shore duty and leave, enlisted men associated in port cities and naval bases with shipyard workers, who are among the most radical revolutionary elemetns in Germany. On board vessels favorable opportunities for conspiracy existed, and discontent was communicated rapidly from man to man. Possibly, also, propaganda drifted down the Baltic from the Bolshevist stronghold at Kronstadt.

Nevertheless, most of the complaints of the army and navy concerned service grievances. They would not have infected an empire if the whole body politic had not been feverish with the toxins of the old régime. Political discontent was universal.

Meanwhile, a deliberate and long-planned scheme of revolt was promoted at Berlin. The censorship, the state-of-siege law, the suspension of regulations protecting workers, were specific grievances. The failure of the government to liberalize the Prussian franchise, and the stupid resistance of the Junkers to every move toward popular government, embittered, not only the Socialists, but also Liberals of the middle class. Insensibly the whole nation was drifting toward radicalism. Directly as the pressure of the popular will upon the shell of the old system increased, the autocrats added new weights to the safety-valve. Professional revolutionists, with trained fingers on the pulse of the people, stood alert to utilize the crisis.

In former years the Socialist party in Germany financed revolution in Russia. Now the Bolshevists could return the favor. Lenin’s note-presses were reeling off paper roubles, with which he established credits abroad for propaganda. Sums equivalent to millions of dollars found their way from Petrograd and Moscow to the Radical Socialists in Berlin, and were quietly used to prepare the public mind for events whose shadow already lay athwart the heavens, and to arm the proletariat.

By this time, the ruling powers of Germany were trying to parry the lightning of revolution with the foil of parliamentary reform. Here an interesting Nemesis appears. For years, not only German Conservatives, but influential Socialists, had preached the doctrine that workers could better their condition more quickly under a monarchy than under a democracy. They compared the backward labor legislation of England and America with the advanced laws and their excellent enforcement in Germany, and asked the people, ‘Do you prefer the enlightened paternalism of the Hohenzollerns or the brutal exploitation of Manchester and Wall Street plutocrats?’ Thus they created distrust in constitutional democracy, by representing it as but ‘a new machine for pumping blood from the veins of the workers.’ But they did not succeed in their prime object of making monarchy the only alternative. The masses conceived a dictatorship of the proletariat as a third exit from their difficulties.

However, during the pause before the plunge into revolution, a responsible ministry was formed under Prince Max of Baden, with Social Democrats of the safe and sane school in the administration. This cabinet, supported by a panicky Reichstag and by a Prussian legislature bedazzled by the light of a new and unwelcome era, hastened to liberalize the old constitution so as to concede overnight what progressives had sought in vain for decades. These changes gave Germany a government as liberal in form as that of England, but not confirmed by practice and parliamentary habit. It had, in the popular eye, the dubious aspect of a death-bed repentance. Four years ago such a reconstruction might have stabilized the Empire for decades. Now it came too late.

This marks the limit of the bourgeois revolution, which lasted from the appointment of Prince Max as Chancellor, on October 3, until the abdication of the Kaiser on November 9. Then began the Social Democratic revolution, which is still in progress. Bourgeois revolution meant remodeling and modernizing the old government plant. Social revolution means tearing down the old plant and building anew. Social Democrats do not agree among themselves upon the new design; but they are unanimous that it must differ fundamentally in form and functions from the old one.

When the war broke out, the Social Democratic executive, partly convinced that Germany was being wantonly attacked, partly inspired by traditional hatred of the Tsar, partly fearing to sacrifice concrete legislative attainments by incurring political unpopularity in a period of war hysteria, and partly narcotized by long indulgence in nationalist visions, voted credits for the war and supported the government in its policy of aggression.

But from the first some dissented. As early as December, 1914, Karl Liebknecht handed the following statement to the President of the Reichstag, though he was prevented by disorders in the house from making it orally, and by the officers of the Reichstag from inserting it in the minutes: —

‘This war, which no one of the nations participating in it desired, was not started for the welfare of the German nation or of any other nation. It is a strictly imperialistic war, and a war for the capitalist control of world-markets; for the political subjugation of important areas of colonization which can be dominated by our industrial and banking capital. It is, viewed from the standpoint of world-armament, a “preventive” war, caused by the German and Austrian war-parties acting together in the obscure paths of semi-absolutism and secret diplomacy. It is a typical Bonapartist campaign to demoralize and ruin the rising labor movement. The recent months have shown these facts with increasing clearness, in spite of the ruthless campaign to confuse the public mind.

‘The German battle-cry, “Against Tsarism,” serves in the same way as the present English and French battle-cry, “Against Militarism,” to mobilize the noblest instincts and the revolutionary aspirations and traditions of the people in the service of international hatred. Germany, which is the accomplice of Tsarism and the typical representative of political backwardness, is not called to be a liberator of nations. The liberation of Russia, like the liberation of Germany, must be the work of its own people. The war is not a German defensive war. Its historical character and its course up to the present moment prevent our believing a capitalistic government when it states that the purpose for which it demands the present credit is the defense of the Fatherland.’

No formal break occurred in the Social-Democratic Reichstag delegation till March 24, 1916, when Hugo Haase, with a score or more followers, refused to vote for the war-budget. The caucus then expelled the bolters, and the latter formed what is now the Independent Socialist party. Coincident with the outbreak of the revolution, a third more radical body was formed. Its members called themselves Spartacans, from the pseudonym signed by their leader, Karl Liebknecht, to a series of sensational revolutionary letters which he secretly issued early in the war. The Spartacans are affiliated in doctrine and organization with the Russian Bolshevists. Sporadic or local groups still more extreme have appeared here and there, and have been inaccurately dubbed ‘Communists’ and ‘syndicalists.’ They are more properly chaos parties.

On November 2, when service grievances in the navy flashed a spark into the powder magazine of popular discontent, Germany seemed well started toward orderly liberal reform. The conservative Social Democrats of Prince Max’s Cabinet did not lead their followers into revolution. They evidently were not fully aware of its imminence. They probably wished to avoid an overturn which would play into the hands of their more radical rivals. When the country drifted irresistibly into the rapids of political revolt, they merely tried to steer clear of the boulders in the channel. They were not an impelling force in revolution, and therefore they sacrificed the prestige that goes to men of action in a crisis.

On the November Saturday when the Kiel sailors started a navy strike, a grievance committee was appointed to present their demands to their superiors. These demands were rather radical, — such as equal rations for men and officers, and abolition of saluting except on duty, — and they contained one political request, the abdication of the Kaiser. Almost immediately, however, Social Democrats—mostly of the independent wing—took control of the situation. They turned the navy strike into a revolution, by substituting for the petitions of the sailors, whose eyes were still mainly on such things as mess-reforms, the single demand that a sailors’ and soldiers’ council should approve all orders of the officers. Here this institution first entered German political life.

Soldiers’ Councils were organized during the Russian Revolution of 1905, and are said to have been modeled by the professional conspirators of that country upon similar bodies formed in 1647 among Cromwell’s troops. Each regiment of the Roundhead army elected a committee of privates and lower officers, who became for a time the mouthpiece of the English Revolution in civil as well as military matters. Their members were known as ‘agitators,’ a term quite suggestive of their functions.

Such councils may be organized by soldiers, by sailors, by workingmen, or by peasants. Transplanted from Russia to Kiel, they propagated themselves throughout Germany almost overnight. The Berlin authorities tried to isolate the Kiel revolt focus by stopping railway communication; but the mutineers sent torpedo-boats and small cruisers to the port towns and Hansa cities, and speedily outflanked the government forces. Resistance collapsed, because the old régime had lost moral self-confidence, and authority fell into the hands of soldiers’ and workers’ councils, because they are the spontaneous organs of proletarian revolution. They are the simple and obvious tools for overthrowing an existing order where the new order to be created professes to be based on the will of the people. At the time of the Kiel revolt, a great part of the adult male population of Germany belonged to troop formations—regiments, batteries, and similar units—which had common interests during a period of upheaval. Another large fraction of the people was already crystallized into occupational groups, at factories, mines, mercantile establishments, banks, and government offices, where they had common interests and were accustomed to act together.

The sailors on a naval vessel were in a similar position. Indeed, the peasants of a village or countryside were the only workers of Germany who lived under conditions similar to those almost universal in America when our township government arose, and peasants’ councils are boards of selectmen. It was the vocational community of interest, as much as neighborhood grouping of New England farmers, which created our township system; it is the vocational community of interest of modern industrial workers which has made trade divisions and factory walls supersede precinct boundaries in the electoral system of the Soviets. A workers’ council is a shop committee with political functions and authority.

The Soviet stage of the revolution lasted from the abdication of the Kaiser and the resignation of Prince Max until the assembling of the Constitutional Convention at Weimar on February 6. Parenthetically, the Kaiser’s abdication and the renunciation of the throne by the Crown Prince were regarded in Germany as minor incidents in the great flow of events. They were not excitedly discussed, and even sturdy monarchists hasted to distinguish between their loyalty to the institution and to individuals. Simplicissimus pictured the common sentiment in a cartoon representing a desolate ‘No-Man’s Land,’ stretching under gray clouds to a remote horizon. In the far distance was the minute departing figure of the Kaiser, and in the foreground were the German people, represented by widows, orphans, and war-cripples, staring after him with seared faces and corpse-like fixity. The legend was, ‘We shed no tears for him, for he has left us no tears to shed.’

During the Soviet period, Germany was ruled by a central government appointed by the Soldiers’ and Workers’ Councils of Greater Berlin and the Empire, through their central committees and congresses. Cabinets similarly set up and accredited took the place of the former hereditary rulers and ministries of the Federal States. Not a crowned head remained there between the North Sea and the Adriatic, though the heads that had worn crowns were unharmed.

Hardly was the project for a constitutional convention under way, when civil dissension started anew in Germany. This was not a struggle between reaction and revolution, but within the ranks of revolution itself. Both Majority Socialists and Independents served in the first Cabinet after the abdication; but at holiday time the Independents withdrew, and since then have remained outside of and hostile to the government. The Workers’ Councils, although their congress indorsed, and indeed created, the convention, do not want to relinquish their own authority. Majority Socialists support the convention; Independent Socialists trim between the convention and the councils; while the Spartacans tried to prevent an election, and now repudiate constitutional democracy and advocate a dictatorship of the proletariat. In their effort to accomplish their purpose the Spartacans have instigated revolts and political strikes throughout Germany, which culminated in three periods of heavy fighting at Berlin, late in December, early in January, and early in March. Each successive attempt was more desperate and more nearly successful than its predecessor.

The Constitutional Convention has met and organized a government. It has adopted a temporary constitution and is debating a permanent constitution. A majority of the German nation have given it a legitimate title to authority by their votes. But the status of this government is still insecure.

No useful purpose would be served by recounting the ebb and flow of Spartacan revolt, which is a European rather than a specifically German phenomenon. Neither would it be fruitful to detail the controversies among the Socialist factions. The radicals want to socialize industry at once; the moderates want to do so gradually. The radicals want a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would exclude all but manual or mental workers from political rights, and a government similar to that of Russia; to the moderates, Russia’s example is anathema, and a dictatorship of the proletariat is treason to democracy. Efforts to unite upon a middle ground have so far failed. The legitimate government is trying to incorporate the Workers’ Councils in the parliamentary system. Coal-mining is being socialized, and insurance and deep-sea fishing, as well as all local public utilities not already owned by state and municipal governments, are destined speedily to undergo the same treatment. But mere political mechanics cannot control the forces of upheaval.

One reason why Germany seemed to have a machine-made revolution was that its proletariat was so well disciplined. Tammany Hall in its palmiest days, or the Republican Party in 1906, was not so efficiently organized as the Social Democratic party and its trade-union shadow, with their hierarchy of salaried managers, secretaries, and propagandists. The party had its own schools and training system to teach socialist theory and political tactics tot youths and field-workers of both sexes. Therefore, Germany was as well organized for revolt at home as it was for war abroad. The result is that the revolution continues in a sense under the constellation of the old régime. The party bureaucracy still holds the reins. The government has been revolutionized, but not the party itself. The leaders sincerely desire social and political reform; but their uninspiring professionalism checks spontaneity, and makes the common followers distrustful. The revolution in its Weimar manifestation resembles a great, advanced political renascence in America, controlled by machine politicians. In addition, the Social-Democratic party originated and matured as a party of opposition. The rank and file conceive government only as something to be fought. Their own champions become objects of suspicion when they don the robes of state.

Furthermore, the ordinary machinery of government has not changed. No spoils-to-the-victors policy was adopted. The old civil servants moil over their desks, and the old judges dispense justice. Even higher bureaucrats remain in office; and occasionally some Bourbon local dignitary intones a subdued hymn of regretful praise for the departed Hohenzollerns. The Prussian Minister of Education was recently compelled to issue an order forbidding the ceremonious reinstallation of royal portraits and busts in certain schools and government offices, whence they were removed in the early days of the revolution. Whenever the Junker spirit thus raises itself to view, it inspires the commons with a momentary spasm of enraged distrust.

However, even the bourgeoisie accepts the revolution as an accomplished fact, and faces with comparative resignation the economic consequences of Socialism. An Australian observer writes from Berlin, —

‘Germany’s substantial burgers regard the approaching Socialist order as inevitable; and the so-called middle class, including the bureaucracy, seems gradually to grow friendly to Socialism. … In the nightly street debates in Potsdam Place I recently heard a student with duel-scarred features, who probably was a devoted follower of Treitschke a year ago, shout to a Spartacan street orator, “Go read your Kautsky and learn sense.” Another time an elegantly dressed gentleman in a silk hat interrupted a similar speaker with, “You are preaching revolution against a real Socialist government, which is utter madness.”’

At times such support of the present authorities may only add to the distrust of the populace. In any case, one must distinguish between the revolution as a political formality and as a social revolt.

Spartacus draws its vitality from this distinction. ‘Its agitation uses the methods of a hypnotizer monotonously repeating one idea—“Everything must be torn down before we can begin to build anew.” That thought works with a magic charm on the hysterical public mind, thrown off its balance by the nerve-killing strain of war and revolution.’ How well the artificial hunger of the protracted food-blockade fostered such ideas is suggested by a recent declaration of the Spartacan leader, Schumacher: ‘We hope that conditions will become worse in Germany than in Russia. Our factories should be put entirely out of commission. When the people are half-starved, we then shall be ready to rebuild upon the ruins of the old.’

This seems madness, but it is a madness that should be pondered. We regard the recent war as differing only quantitatively from other wars; to Europeans still panting under its incubus, it is different in kind as well as in extent. We regard revolution as an outcome of war. Millions of Europeans regard the war as but an episode in revolution. If they are right, those who deal with revolution as only an aftermath of war may see their covenants and settlements and paper-adjustments swept into the waste-basket of history, with the other archives of human error. In dealing with new eras the practical wisdom of older eras is often folly.

In its larger sense the revolution represents iconoclasm toward revered social forms. It would uproot, not only property rights, but religious and moral standards. A great sign on the municipal building of Moscow reads: ‘Religion is a narcotic for the masses.’ The war was such a conspicuous repudiation of Christian teaching that it has wrecked spiritual faith. A German priest writes in a clerical paper, confirming abundant testimony from other sources, ‘By 1917, furloughed soldiers, who in the earlier years of the war almost invariably came to take the sacrament before returning to the front, entirely ceased to do so.’ God lost prestige in Germany from his association with the Kaiser; and the church is regarded a Junker institution.’

Patriotism and loyalty are sentiments almost as suspect as piety. They, too, are regarded as narcotics for the masses, to stupefy the commons while privilege picks their pockets. The great war-fortunes, the passion for luxury and pleasure, and the conspicuous prodigality that accompanied war-inflation justify such skepticism in the eyes of the suffering people. Little or no moral stigma attaches to disloyalty. Deserters hold public meetings, organize special councils to defend their interests, hold dances and entertainments, and rate their act good service against militarism. A sign on a government building in a Berlin suburb recently read: ‘Information office for furloughed soldiers; deserters, and discharged soldiers.’ The man who preaches patriotism is suspected of drawing a herring across the trail of social progress to divert people from pursuing their true interests. In a word, revolution teaches atheism in respect to current social faiths, and its leaders live, mentally, in a fourth dimension inconceivable to the average American.

Moral chaos in high places started the war; moral chaos at the base of society impels the revolution. This is not revolt against morality per se, but against the traditional forms of morality that permitted the appalling catastrophe of the war. This ethical repulsion assumes futurist aspects which reflect themselves in manners as well as conduct. The press of the revolution outdoes the slums in despising conventional courtesies of language. A collector of current idiosyncracies discovered that the Berlin organ of the Spartacans, The Red Flag, in forty-two consecutive issues used the word ‘murderer’ 318 times, ‘bloodhound’ 221 times, ‘traitor’ 461 times, ‘capitalist hireling’ 305 times, and ‘henchman of the money-power’ 250 times.

A legion of new revolutionary periodicals has sprung up in every city of importance. These wild-opinioned and usually ephemeral publications bear names that suggest the tenor of their contents. One in Budapest is known as The Dunghill; and another in Berlin is printed on red paper and bears the title, The Red Gallows. The editor of the latter signs his leaders ‘The Hangman.’ Cool-headed Germans ascribe these phenomena to war-neurosis complicated by revolution and undernourishment; and indeed there is more or less physiological reason for many of the manifestations now occurring.

If we consider the physical basis of society, not only has material civilization drifted backward; not only have homes, factories, farms, forests, mines, and railways been destroyed or wasted, so that large populations are now existing on previous accumulations, — lessened as these already are, — because they are not producing as much as they consume; but the despair in Europe inhibits production itself. Behind the social superficies with which parliaments and constitutional conventions and peace congresses have been tinkering is, in the last analysis, the individual man, who has been demoralized. A generation of young people has grown up without the discipline and restraint which older prudence imposed upon future citizens during their immaturity. Families have been broken up. Sexual morality has declined. Habits of industry have been undermined. Men are unwilling to return to useful labor. Patience to endure toil was destroyed upon the battlefield. The factory output per operative has fallen off; coal-miners produce hardly a third as much per shift as before the war. Germany’s farms are calling for nearly a million laborers. More than a million men are idle in the cities, but they refuse to heed that call. Budapest is overcrowded with peasants from the great estates, who have flocked in from the country because they refuse longer to till land which is not their own.

Only a crowded metropolis can satisfy the craving of the discharged soldiers for excitements. There the dangerous, ever latent blood-lust of the brute in man, aroused by four years of legalized killing, incites to homicide. Murders have multiplied, and street battles are the matinées of the populace.

‘A dozen Spartacans start to storm a police office. A flock of criminals swarms to the scene of disorder and begins to loot. A detachment of marines arrives, and captures the looters, whom it lines up against a wall and shoots. The order is, “Shoot on the spot anyone caught plundering.” Then suddenly the marines begin to direct their fire against the police office itself. They have found an unpopular rival military organization garrisoning the place. …

‘Meanwhile, the general public crowds around. Everyone must be right on hand, women as well as men. They gather in dense groups behind the nearest corner that affords protection from the flying bullets. There they start lively debates. … So eager are they in their discussions, that the police have difficulty in getting them farther back, out of the direct line of the fire. … Then come people who want to cross the street where the fighting is going on. They make a great complaint because they have no time to make a détour  So they crouch down and scurry across the street, with the bullets and shells whistling past them.’

The deaths come with tragic suddenness, but, like those of an epidemic they affect but little the callous public. A young girl steps out of the conservatory from her music lesson, and a bullet crashes through her forehead. The public gathers for a moment as it would after an automobile accident; the corpse is carried into the nearest drug-store, and the people hasten away on their daily errands. While the battle is raging in one street, the public is promenading unconcerned along a neighboring thoroughfare. Hand-organs are grinding, and newsboys calling their papers.

‘While I write this, not only do I hear the rattle of machine-guns, but at the same time I hear the orchestra playing in the gorgeous salon of our sumptuous hotel, where many a daintily clad foot is tripping carelessly at a tea dance.’

Indeed, the people of Berlin resumed dancing with such extraordinary enthusiasm after the relaxation of war-restraints, that the police have interfered to enforce moderation.

Death and dancing side by side—that is one aspect of the revolution. Another aspect is ever-reappearing Nemesis. Incidents of the Belgian invasion, for instance, are visited with almost startling identity upon the German people themselves. Their cities, spared by war, are ravaged by the air-bombs and shells of their own aviators and artillery. A rifle accidentally discharged in a crowd creates a false alarm; and a peaceful home is invaded and the inmates are killed, because the excited mob fancies that counter-revolutionists have fired from its windows. Two women had their throats cut under such circumstances at Hamburg. A crowd of hungry children gathered around the field-kitchen of a detachment of government troops in a Berlin suburb last spring, begging for food. They did not disperse when told, and an angry soldier ‘dropped’ a fog-bomb in the midst. In addition to those burned, four little girls and one little boy were carried, seriously wounded, to a hospital. A timid old merchant, an aged invalid, was accustomed to keep a small revolver on the table at the head of his bed at night. It was discovered by a lieutenant and soldiers searching for forbidden arms; and the old man was forthwith led into the court of his building and shot.

These incidents are not peculiar to Germany. The horrors of the Bolshevist foray across the territories evacuated by the German troops in Russia belittle all that has occurred at any time since August 1, 1914, farther West. The recent pogroms in Poland and in Galicia; the excesses of the Roumanian irregular troops in Transylvania, — where Count Karolyi charges them with cutting off the arms of Hungarian peasants and rubbing salt on the stumps, — and the brutalities in Budapest itself, are but part of the long record of war-degeneration. Bela Kun, the Bolshevist dictator of Hungary, was himself beaten nearly to death by angry police in his cell last February; and it is typical of the sudden changes of fortune of these abnormal times that he was taken directly from prison to his luxurious official quarters in the royal palace.

Surely there was never a more unpromising introduction to the millennium. And yet a millennium is precisely what the common people of Europe await expectantly. Will their faith be strong enough to urge them upwards toward this goal; or will their despair precipitate them into still darker depths.

In some respects the war has brought the common people of all lands closer together. This has not occurred mainly through political alliances and military coöperation, which in the long run may engender discord and dislike rather than harmony and friendship, but by intensifying their consciousness of common suffering. The ‘solidarity of the proletariat,’ though seriously shaken by animosities of the moment, has really grown stronger, because war has made the rank and file of every country more class-conscious. Where the birth-pains of a new age are most intense, comprehension of that age is likely to come most quickly.

Germans hope that their country may emerge from its present bitter experience with a clarity of political vision and a moral conviction of new social truths that will make her a leader of the new civilization. We ourselves may pause a moment to consider whether, if social betterment through the state and internationalism are to be the guiding principles of the future, the relative position of America and Europe in regard to liberalism may not be reversed during the present century. When the League of Nations Covenant was published, Vorwarts, which represents majority opinion in Germany on such subjects, likened its purely hortatory clauses on international labor-protection to the action of a Liberal meeting in London fifty years ago, which limited its response to a plea for some positive political move in behalf of labor by rising and standing for a moment as a token of its respect for the merits of the toilers.

Yet what seems fifty years behind the times to Germany, presents novel, if not radical, aspects to Americans. Revolutionary Europe is striving toward extreme liberalism in regard to tariffs, immigration, control of capital, international highways and commerce, and all similar matters that may contain the germs of future war. Meanwhile, Germany is dreaming dreams that may be hunger hallucinations, or visions of beatitude like those that sometimes come to men whom the hope of more substantial felicity has deserted. But dreams there are, in the midst of Germany’s humiliation and distress, of her brutalization by foreign and civil war, of her cynical rejection of venerable moral symbols; and from these dreams the people derive something of comfort and inspiration. The following words from the Frankfurter Zeitung, put in the mouth, not of a German, but of a friendly neutral, voice these visions: —

‘Germany must point the way to a better future for the working classes. The French Revolution brought political freedom. The German Revolution must bring economic freedom. Keep your attention on this. Do not become absorbed in worn-out games of high politics. Your armies and your fleets have disappeared. Propaganda in other countries will do no good. Diplomatic manœuvres will lead to nothing. Germany’s influence in the world must be restored by creating higher social forms at home. Then your country will exercise an irresistible influence upon the proletariat of every country.’

But this vision is clouded with doubt; for, as the same friendly observer says, —

‘I do not yet see the creative force; but the German Revolution is far from terminated. I miss the attitude of devotion which, at the high point of the French Revolution, inspired the upper classes to a joyous surrender of their privileges. How would a similar step be contemplated by the capitalists of Germany? We shall not create a new society by bitter controversy, but by sacrifice for the community. We shall succeed, not by Philistinism, but by inspiration.’

‘Poised upon the knife-edge,’ is a description of Germany’s political condition common in the papers of that country. But the people will not yield to Bolshevism without resistance, as did the people of Hungary. Spring sunshine, the passing of the physical discomfort of winter’s cold and darkness, the call to summer labor on the farms, and the partial lifting of the food-blockade, are helping to stabilize conditions. Moreover a nation may become revolution-weary, as it becomes war-weary. Possibly the flood of radicalism is ebbing somewhat and the slow process of social convalescence has begun. But it is too early to make confident predictions; and not until the revolution emerges from the convulsive stage of physical violence and moral chaos, will the real depth of the chasms it has left in the old order be fully revealed.