under 450,000 votes. After twelve years of underground work
as outlaws, the party polled 1,427,000 votes. Despite all the efforts of
Bismarck and all the immense power of the Government, socialism, instead
of being crushed, was 1,000,000 souls stronger after twelve years of
suffering under tyranny than it was in the beginning. This of course
would not do at all, and everyone saw it clearly enough except the Iron
Chancellor. Infuriated by his own failure and unwilling to confess
defeat, he pleaded once more, in 1890, for the reenactment of the
anti-socialist law and, indeed, that it should be made a permanent part
of the penal code of the Empire. He even sought further powers and asked
the Reichstag to give him a law that would enable him to expel not only
from districts proclaimed to be in a state of siege, but from Germany
altogether, those who were known to hold socialist views. The Reichstag,
however, refused to grant him either request, and on September 30, 1890,
just twelve years after its birth, the anti-socialist law was repealed.

That night was a glorious one for the socialists, as well as a very
dreadful one for Bismarck and those others who had made prodigious but
futile efforts to destroy socialism. Berlin was already a socialist
stronghold, and its entire people that night came into the streets to
sing songs of thanksgiving. Streets, parks, public places, cafes,
theaters were filled with merrymakers, rejoicing with songs, with toasts
to the leading socialists, and with boisterous welcomes to the exiles
who were returning. All night long the red flag waved, and the
Marseillaise was sung, as all that passion of love, enthusiasm, and
devotion for a great cause, which, for twelve long years, had been
brutally suppressed, burst forth in floods of joy. "He [Bismarck] has
had at his entire disposal for more than a quarter of a century," said
Liebknecht, "the police, the army, the capital, and the power of the
State--in brief, all the means of mechanical force. _We had only our
just right, our firm conviction, our bared breasts to oppose him with,
and it is we who have conquered! Our arms were the best. In the course
of time brute power must yield to the moral factors, to the logic of
things._ Bismarck lies crushed to the earth--and social democracy is the
strongest party in Germany!... _The essence of revolution lies not in
the means, but in the end. Violence has been, for thousands of years, a
reactionary factor.