anding for this situation, the
mental and material effects of which are equally terrible.

"Dr. Helfferich said in the Budget Committee in the case of Dr.
Franz Mehring that it is better that he should be under detention
than that he should be at large and do something for which he would
have to be punished. According to this reasoning the best thing
would be to lock up everybody and keep them from breaking the law.
The ideal of Dr. Helfferich seems to be the German National Prison
of which Heine spoke. The case of Mehring is classical proof of
the fact that we are no longer far removed from the Helfferich
ideal."

Herr Dittmann went on to say that Herr Mehring's only offence was
that in a letter seized by the police he wrote to a Reichstag
deputy named Herzfeld in favour of a peace demonstration in Berlin,
and offered to write a fly-sheet inviting attendance at such a
meeting. Mehring, who is over 70 years of age, was then locked up.
Herr Dittmann continued:--

"How much longer will it be before even thoughts become criminal in
Germany? Mehring is one of the most brilliant historians and
writers, and one of the first representatives of German
intellectual life--known as such far beyond the German frontiers.
When it is now known abroad that such a man has been put under a
sort of preventive arrest merely in order to cut him off from the
public for political reasons, one really cannot be astonished at
the low reputation enjoyed by the German Government both at home
and abroad. How evil must be the state of a Government which has
to lock up the first minds of the country in order to choke their
opposition!"

Herr Dittmann's second case was that of Frau Rosa Luxemburg. He
said that she was put under arrest many months ago, without any
charge being made against her, and merely out of fear of her
intellectual influence upon the working classes. All the Socialist
women of Germany were deeply indignant, and he invited the
Government to consider that such things must make it the positive
duty of Socialists in France, England, Italy and Russia "to fight
against a Government which imprisons without any reason the
best-known champions of the International proletariat." The
treatment of both Mehring and Frau Luxemburg had been terrible.
The former, old and ill, had had the greatest difficulty in getting
admission to a prison infirmary. Frau Luxemburg a month ago was
taken from her prison bed in the middle of the nig