0[1197]

Commenting upon the foregoing table, a German Socialist periodical
wrote: "An analytical comparison of the electorate of Hamburg and
Bremen reveals an extraordinary similarity in its social composition.
It shows that the workers form hardly a majority of the population.
They can be victorious only when they march hand in hand with
professional men, the lower officials, and the newer middle-class.
However, not all working men are Socialists. At the last election
3,000 working men in Magdeburg, and 2,500 working men in Bremen, voted
against Social-Democracy. The patriotic anti-Socialist working-men's
associations are rapidly increasing their membership. A thousand
workmen, one-third of the whole occupied at the Krupp-Gruson Works in
Magdeburg, have joined the anti-Socialist working-men's associations.
The 'working-men's associations for fighting Social-Democracy' have
grown in a surprising fashion."[1198]

The lower middle-class forms the strongest bulwark against the
progress of Socialism, and Socialists know it. The philosopher of
British Socialism, for instance, wrote: "The proletariat proper, the
class which bears the future Socialist world in its womb, by no means
at present everywhere outweighs, numerically, all other classes. On
the contrary, so far as I am aware, this is only the case in Great
Britain and some of the North American States, and even in these
countries the majority is not large. The bulk of the non-proletarian
sections of the democracy are by no means proletarian or
Social-Democratic, even in their instincts, let alone Socialistic in
their convictions. The predominating, or at all events most
influential, elements in the non-proletarian democracy are what, for
brevity, I have rather loosely termed the clerk and the shopkeeping
class: in other words, they who are, or hope to become, small
capitalists, the small middle-class. This last section of the 'people'
or the democracy is, as such, the most formidable, because the most
subtle, enemy with which the Socialist movement has to contend. The
aim of the small capitalist, and of him who hopes to become one, is
security and free play under the most advantageous conditions for his
small capital to operate. On this account the little bourgeois, the
small middle-class in its various sections, is the great obstacle
which will have to be suppressed before we can hope to see even the
inauguration of a consciously Socialist policy. It must be destro