rl Liebknecht, recently elected to the
Reichstag from the Kaiser's own district of Potsdam, who spent a year as
a political prisoner in Germany for his "Militarismus und
Anti-Militarismus." Liebknecht opens his pamphlet by quoting a statement
of Bismarck to Professor Dr. Otto Kamaell, in October, 1892:--

"In Rome water and fire were forbidden to him who put himself
outside of the legal order. In the middle ages that was called to
outlaw. It was necessary to treat the Social-Democracy in the same
way, to take away its political rights and its right to vote. So
far I have gone. The Social-Democratic question is a military
question. The Social-Democracy is being handled now in an
extraordinarily superficial way. The Social-Democracy is striving
now--and with success--to win the noncommissioned officers. In
Hamburg already a good part of the troops consist of
Social-Democrats, since the people there have the right to enter
exclusively into their own battalion. What now if these troops
should refuse to shoot their fathers and brothers as the Kaiser has
demanded? Shall we send the regiments of Hanover and Mecklenburg
against Hamburg? Then we have something there like the Commune in
Paris. The Kaiser was frightened. He said to me he wouldn't exactly
care about being called a cardboard prince like his grandfather,
nor at the very beginning of his reign to wade up to the knees in
blood. Then I said to him, 'Your Majesty will have to go deeper if
you give way now.'"

Here we have it from the lips of Bismarck that the Social-Democratic
question was already a military question in his time, and his view is
supported by the present Kaiser. This is high authority. Similar views
and threats have been common among the statesmen of our time in nearly
every country.

As early as 1903 the government of Holland broke a large general strike
by the use of the army to operate the railroads, and the same thing was
done in Hungary in the following year. Indeed, these measures had such a
great success that the Hungarian government went farther two years
later, and took away the right of organization from the agricultural
laborers; while at the same time it used the army as strike breakers in
harvest time and made permanent arrangements for doing this in a similar
contingency in the future. In the matter of breaking railway strikes by
soldiers, B