likely
that the general strike will also have to be used on a somewhat smaller
scale even before the supreme crisis comes. Jaures thinks that it will
be needed to bring about essential reforms or to prevent war, and Bebel
believes that it will very likely have to be used to defend existing
political and economic rights of the working class; in other words, to
protect the Party and the unions from destruction. At the Congress at
Jena in 1905 the conservative trade union official, von Elm, together
with a majority of the speakers, argued that it was possible that an
attempt would be made to take away from the German working people the
right of suffrage, the freedom of the press and assemblage and the right
of organization. In such a case he and others advocate a general strike,
though he said he fully realized it would be a bloody one. "We must
reckon with this," he said. "As a matter of course, we wish to shed no
blood, but our enemies drive us into the situation.... The moment comes
when you must be ready to give up your blood and your property [here he
was interrupted by stormy applause]. Prepare yourselves for this
possibility. Our youths must be brought up so that among the soldiers
here and there will be a man who will think twice before he shoots at
his father and mother [as Kaiser Wilhelm publicly insists he must], and
at the same time at freedom." The reception of von Elm's speech showed
that his words represented the feeling of the whole German movement.
Bebel spoke with the same decision, advocating the use of the general
strike under the same conditions as did von Elm, while at the next
congress at Mannheim he declared that it would also be justified, under
certain circumstances, not only for protecting existing rights, but for
extending them, _e.g._ for the purpose of obtaining universal and equal
suffrage in Prussia. Bebel did not think that the party or the unions
were strong enough at that moment to use the general strike for other
than defensive purposes, but he said that, if they were able to double
their strength,--and it now seems they will have accomplished this
within a very few years,--then the time would doubtless arrive when it
would be worth while to risk the employment of this rather desperate
measure for aggressive purposes also.

While Socialism is thus traveling steadily in the direction of a
revolutionary general strike, capitalist governments are coming to
regard every strike of the first i