--

"The enemy who comes to us with an open visor we face with a smile;
to set our feet upon his neck is mere play for us. The stupidly
brutal acts of violence of police politicians, the outrages of
anti-Socialist laws, penitentiary bills--these only arouse feelings
of pitying contempt; the enemy, however, that reaches out the hand
to us for a political alliance, and intrudes himself upon us as a
friend and a brother,--_him and him alone have we to fear_.

"Our fortress can withstand every assault--it cannot be stormed nor
taken from us by siege--it can only fall _when we ourselves open
the doors to the enemy and take him into our ranks as a fellow
comrade_."

"We shall almost never go right," says Liebknecht, "if we do what our
enemies applaud." And we find, as a matter of fact, that the enemies of
Socialism never fail to applaud any tendency of the party to compromise
those acting principles that have brought it to the point it has now
reached. For Liebknecht shows that the power which now causes a
Socialist alliance to be sought after in some countries even by
Socialism's most bitter enemies would never have arisen had the party
not clung closely to its guiding principle, the policy of "no
compromise."

There is no difficulty in showing, from the public life and opinion of
our day, how widespread is this spirit of political compromise or
opportunism; nor in proving that it enters into the conduct of many
Socialists. Such an opposition to the effective application of broad and
far-sighted plans to practical politics is especially common, for
historical reasons, in Great Britain and the United States. In this
country it has been especially marked in Milwaukee from the earliest
days of the Socialist movement there. In 1893 the _Milwaukee Vorwaerts_
announced that "if you demand too much at one time you are likely not to
get anything," and that "nothing more ought to be demanded but what is
attainable at a given time and under given circumstances."[99] It will
be noticed that this is a clear expression of a principle of action
diametrically opposite to that adopted by the international movement as
stated by Bebel and Liebknecht. Socialists are chiefly distinguished
from the other parties by the fact that they concentrate their attention
on demands beyond "what is attainable at a given time and under given
circumstances." They might _attempt_ to distinguish th