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Of all the Socialist leaders I ever met, Wilhelm Liebknecht, to my mind, most fully deserved the title of “statesman.” And I say this certainly without any strong prejudice in favour of his attitude towards English Social-Democrats, as for many years he took what I may call the Engels view of our movement, and steadily supported our worst enemies against us. But his general capacity must not be judged by what he himself afterwards admitted was a great mistake. He was exceedingly loyal to his friends, could not or would not believe anything bad of them, and, being very intimate with Engels, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, he could not at the time understand that they might possibly be quite wrong in their view of us. Yet Liebknecht did us great mischief. He supported first the Socialist League, thus intensifying the misunderstanding between the sections, and then Dr. Edward Aveling. Aveling was a man of very bad character, as the terrible tragedy which brought Eleanor Marx to her end afterwards disclosed to the world. Liebknecht saw most of his drawbacks; but his affection and regard for Eleanor, virtually Aveling’s wife, induced him, having seen, to shut his eyes.
I have no belief myself whatever in the vox populi, vox dei notion. The counting of noses is only made use of in order to avoid the resort to brute force. Democracy is either very jealous of merit, or very servile to it, if merit is allied to resolute will and power. Yet, with all the strong feeling against the judgment of their own elected representatives which has always prevailed in our Social-Democratic Party, but for Liebknecht and the influence of himself and his foreign friends, we should probably have kept Aveling out of our body and have saved Eleanor Marx’s life, which at the time of her death was of the greatest value to the party both in this country and abroad. So, I repeat, I have no reason to err on the side of excessive appreciation of Liebknecht’s capacity.
But he had great abilities, and they were always fully at his command. He possessed faculties of administration, democratic control and tactful management which are rare in any party, and specially rare among Socialists. He was also one of the very few Continental Socialists who understood England well, and who saw that, with all our revolting conservatism at home and unscrupulous imperialism abroad, we might still play a great and useful part in the coming revolutionary period. He, therefore, always maintained an attitude of friendship towards this country, and made a point of keeping himself thoroughly well informed as to what was going on. Though as genuine a revolutionist as ever took part in the Socialist movement, he put his extreme opinions in the mildest and most convincing way, both in speech and in writing. A thorough-going internationalist, he recognised the great value of nationality and the diversity of faculty which the various civilised countries, owing to their different history and stages of development, contribute to the common stock. He was also an ardent advocate of peace, and at a period when the great majority of his countrymen were infuriated against the French, he proclaimed his admiration for that fine people and, with his friend and comrade Bebel, suffered for his protest against the war of 1870 by undergoing a lengthy term of imprisonment.
Liebknecht was a Socialist when Socialism involved sacrifice and suffering of every kind. Sixty-three years ago to be a revolutionary Socialist was no light matter. Like many other Socialist leaders, Liebknecht was a man of University distinction and high culture and attainments. Yet after ’48 he found himself expatriated here in England, in dire poverty and with little prospect of earning a decent livelihood. When he first took refuge on these shores, in fact, he was in great distress, and he told me that so hard pushed at one time were he and a friend, who shared the same room in a poor quarter, that they had pawned even all their clothing; until they had, in addition to their coats and waistcoats, but a single pair of trousers between them. This pair Liebknecht wore when he went out searching for employment, his comrade lying in bed the while he did so; or Liebknecht lay in bed while his partner in hard times took his turn in the seeking for work. At last, when they were in utter extremity, first Liebknecht and then his companion got something to do.
During the years he was compelled to remain in this country Liebknecht learned English thoroughly, and was ever after able to address an audience in fluent and well-chosen language, as well as, of course, to converse with ease and with a marvellous knowledge of the common talk of the day: differing in this respect from other foreigners who have mastered our tongue but speak it almost too correctly. It was his experience of English life and English ways, his acquaintance with French life and French ways, and his sympathy also with Italy and Italians, whose country and language he likewise knew, which enabled him to command great direct influence at the International Congresses, an influence that was always exerted on the side of peace and good feeling, though never in the sense of compromise, or the whittling away of principles.
Towards the close of his life I got to know Liebknecht very well indeed, and the more I knew of him the more respect and even affection I felt for him. Liebknecht was a descendant of the famous Martin Luther, though I am not at all sure he felt very proud of his ancestor, whose views and action in regard to the revolting peasant farmers he certainly did not share and indeed vehemently denounced. It is scarcely too much to say, without detracting in any way from the splendid services of Marx and Engels, the admirable agitation of Lassalle, the powerful oratory and unshakable persistence of Bebel, and the useful organising faculty of Auer, Motteler, Singer, and others, that Liebknecht more than any other man was the founder of German political Social-Democracy as we now know it. On his return to Germany his one idea from the first seems to have been to consolidate German Social-Democracy into one effective whole.
For this work he was peculiarly fitted in every way. It was quite impossible to make Liebknecht angry; yet he gave no impression whatever of being cold or indifferent. However strongly he might feel upon any matter, his emotions were invariably under the control of his intellect. Yet somehow you felt the emotions were there. He would say and do really dangerous things in the coolest and most unemotional way, as if he himself did not fully appreciate the full significance of them, though really, of course, quite aware all the time of their peril to himself, and of the effect they would produce upon others.
Of the many able speakers and orators I have heard I do not know one who has possessed in so high a degree the power of clear, lucid, persuasive statement, without a particle of rhetoric, or any outward evidence of passion, as Liebknecht. Yet he was always interesting and nearly always produced the effect he desired. So calm and capable did he appear at all times that people were apt to forget that Liebknecht was perpetually running very great risks in his business-like, unperturbed fashion. It became quite natural for him to incur terms of imprisonment, about which he made no fuss at all, either when he went in or when he came out. True, German political prisoners are treated with reasonable courtesy and consideration. They are not handled as Davitt and others have been treated in this country in the past, or like lady suffragettes are to-day, as if they were the vilest of unseemly ruffians. A German political prisoner is regarded as a political prisoner, and is entitled to decent surroundings and to the use of his books and papers. Continental usages are never so wholly brutal and blackguardly in this respect as those of the British upper classes, who reserve all their sympathy for the victims of the tyranny of others, and resort freely to the physical and mental torture of their political opponents themselves.
Nevertheless, imprisonment and restraint were, in the best of circumstances, exceedingly trying for a man of Liebknecht’s characteristic love of freedom, and he felt his periods of incarceration very much. Yet he risked their recurrence without the slightest hesitation whenever he thought it necessary to do so. It is sometimes said that protests ineffective at the time are really useless, and that the sacrifices entailed by the forcing to the front of unpopular opinions only injure the cause, while too frequently crippling individuals. I am not of that opinion.
When Liebknecht and Bebel bitterly opposed Bismarck’s war against France in 1870, and were incontinently clapped in gaol, they, by their action on that occasion, laid the foundations of a definite policy for the International Social-Democracy, as being at all times and under all conditions in vehement antagonism to anything in the shape of aggressive warfare, and set an example of individual courage and conduct in this sense which Socialists of other nations have since been proud to follow. From that day to this the course taken by Bebel and Liebknecht at a time of furious chauvinism in Germany, when the memory of past injuries by France was in every mind, has been regarded by all lovers of humanity as one of the finest instances of self-sacrifice in the cause of peace ever heard of.
It may be also that what is said to have occurred when the German armies were encamped around Paris influenced Liebknecht in his efforts to bring about a united Socialist party in Germany. It is certain that at one period during the siege of Paris there was clear evidence at Versailles that the German army was making ready to withdraw. There was no sufficient cause for this in the movements or success of the French armies, who were completely held in check by the Germans. What, then, was the reason for this unexpected change of plan, shortly afterwards again completely abandoned? For some time before this hesitating policy the Marxist party in Berlin, to which Bebel and Liebknecht, of course, belonged, had been endeavouring to organise a great rising in the German Metropolis, and for that purpose had opened negotiations with the Lassalle Socialist party which was national rather than international in its leanings and was then headed by Schweitzer. Certain it is that no sooner were Liebknecht and Bebel released from prison than they set to work to endeavour to combine the two great Socialist sections into one effective army of the German proletariat.
It was a great policy but by no means an easy undertaking. We of to-day who are accustomed to regard the great German Social-Democratic Party as by far the best organised, the most highly disciplined, and the most completely equipped of all Socialist parties can scarcely appreciate the difficulties which had to be overcome, with an active Anarchist section still ready to take advantage of and exaggerate any mistakes, before success in this splendid endeavour could be achieved. It was not attained without terrible stress and strain, and some of the most bitter opposition to the whole scheme actually came from Marx and Engels in London. They feared that the Lassalleaner or Schweitzer party, being the more numerous and having the more attractive programme of German Nationalism at their back, would absorb and render futile the wider propaganda of International Social-Democracy. It was a very trying time.
But Liebknecht had, as he assured me, the most complete confidence in victory from the first. In fact he felt more confidence in the eventual triumph of the views of Marx than Marx did himself. If the two parties once came together then, no matter how numerous the other body might be, the gospel accorded to Marx would prevail. And prevail it did. But it required no little coolness and determination on the part of Liebknecht, Bebel and their friends to fight the good fight of Socialist unity in Germany against the two great theorists of modern Socialism. Writing in 1911 when Social-Democracy is by far the strongest single political party in Germany, when its press is becoming every day a greater power in the land, and at a time when the manifest growth of its voting record is so great that the Government is in serious alarm, and may even hurry on its programme of aggression in order to forestall the period when the Social-Democrats will be able to put a final stop to militarism and imperialism, and compel a return to the unenvied pacific policy of the old German Bund before Prussia and the Hohenzollerns gained their harmful predominance – writing with such results achieved it is difficult to overrate the service rendered to Germany and the world at large by Wilhelm Liebknecht when he did so much to place the party on a sound and permanent footing.
Though now and then we may become very impatient and wish that so powerful a force could be used to anticipate events somewhat; yet on sober reflection we are bound to admit that never in the whole history of mankind has such a tremendous social revolution as that involved in the triumph of organised Social-Democracy been so calmly, resolutely, and, it may fairly be said, scientifically prepared. Heine was right: when the German revolution does come it will far transcend in scope, significance, and permanence the French Revolution of 1789. Four millions of German voters, though not perhaps all thorough Social-Democrats still sympathisers with the Socialists, at least two-fifths of the trained soldiery of the fatherland, and a large and growing proportion of the educated classes feel that the day of victory is slowly but inevitably coming nearer, and that this victory when it is won will be largely due to Wilhelm Liebknecht and his brother-worker, August Bebel.
When Liebknecht had overcome his prejudices against the Social-Democratic Federation and myself, we got to know one another very well. This change began at the great International Congress of 1896 in London, when I presided at a very stormy sitting, and succeeded to a large extent in calming down Anarchist violence; when, too, at the close of the proceedings one of these same Anarchists, a black sheep among the brethren of that persuasion, I readily admit, took revenge upon the Social-Democratic leader by prematurely communising Liebknecht’s watch to his own use. At the principal evening meeting I was chairman, and I had a good opportunity of judging of Liebknecht’s admirable powers of exposition in a language not his own. No Englishman of our day could have delivered a better speech in its calm, masterly and persuasive style; and one felt throughout, devoid as it was of any attempt to give prominence to the speaker, that here was a genuine statesman of Social-Democracy.
Perhaps the coolness and solidity of Liebknecht were the more marked by reason of the contrast with the Spanish orator, Pablo Iglesias. What he said, translated by Lafargue, was excellent; but his way of saying it was so impressive that, although the audience did not understand a word of his language, he was interrupted by bursts of applause at several points in his address – a thing which I have only once noted since, under similar circumstances, where the speaker was not understood. I mention this here because we English are apt to underrate the value of appropriate gesture in public speaking, and I never felt this more keenly than when I observed the extraordinary effect produced upon this crowded meeting by Iglesias.
From 1896 onwards my relations with Wilhelm Liebknecht, as already said, became very close, and led to one of the most interesting episodes in the way of personal intercourse I can recall. This was when Liebknecht and Jaurès both stayed with us at the same time in Queen Anne’s Gate. There could not be a greater contrast between two personalities than that between these two able men, whose services have made so deep a mark on the records of Socialism in France and Germany. Liebknecht, cool, able, cautiously daring, and quite devoid of oratorical arts and graces. Jaurès, brilliant, dashing, and apparently rash, though really much more prudent than he looked, attaching, as he well might, great importance to his oratorical powers. The one far more revolutionary and reckless than he seemed: the other much less revolutionary and reckless than he appeared; both highly cultivated and well-read University men of letters, very different indeed from the ordinary conception of Socialist agitators.
In fact, they were two excellent specimens of those who have done the greater part of the really arduous work of Socialism in every country. That work has been done not by the artisans and labourers themselves, but by the highly educated men of the class above. This in every case. Joffrin, Bracke, Debs, Anseele, Quelch, Williams, and the veteran August Bebel, have been quite the exceptions, and even they, all put together, have not developed the originality that might be expected from a rising class. That, as Marx said, the emancipation of the workers must be brought about by the workers themselves is true in the sense that we cannot have Socialism without Socialists, any more than we can achieve and carry on a Republic without Republicans. But a slave class cannot be freed by the slaves themselves. The leadership, the initiative, the teaching, the organisation, must come from those who are born into a different position, and are trained to use their faculties in early life. So far, several of the more energetic of the working class, when they have obtained their education from the well-to-do Socialists who have been sacrificing themselves for their sake, have hastened to sell out to the dominant minority, and most of the workers, in Great Britain at any rate, have applauded their sagacity, and have voted for the successful turncoats at the polls.
Of the two men I am speaking of, Liebknecht, beyond all question, had the harder life and the less encouraging task. He spoke to me with some bitterness of the manner in which he was grudged the small salary paid him for the heavy work of editing the Vorwärts and carrying on the most exhausting toil of platform agitation at the same time, and the petty detraction to which he was subjected. He adjured me, no matter how harassing my private affairs might be, never, under any circumstances, to put myself under obligations to the party. And Liebknecht had a family dependent upon his ill-requited labours, and could easily have taken a high position in the State had he chosen to give up his party.
This last observation applies also to Jaurès, but he has never at any time had to undergo, luckily for him, the privation which usually falls to the lot of pioneers, and which the men who made the movement in France had to undergo before he found it already vigorous and strong. This is said in no reproach to Jaurès, who certainly cannot be blamed for what has been his good fortune due to the date of his birth; but the difference between the layer of the foundations and the builder of the stories above the ground floor is very marked. The Guesdists and the Blanquists and the Possibilists had dug out the basement and put in the supports with the greatest effort and at heavy risk long before Jaurès and his fellow-Parliament-men came to the front. Liebknecht, on the other hand, bore throughout his long and laborious life the burden and heat of the day.
Such were the two eminent Socialists who came to stay with us in Queen Anne’s Gate. A typical educated German of the North, a brilliant French Professor of literature from the South. The contrast was marked in physique, as in mind and disposition: Liebknecht with spare frame and long thoughtful countenance; Jaurès strongly inclined to stoutness and with a jubilant and humorous visage. Liebknecht, a master of several languages for the purpose of conversation; Jaurès knowing no tongue familiarly but his own. Liebknecht the deliberate, convinced enthusiast, consciously influencing others and but rarely influenced by them; Jaurès influencing others almost unconsciously, but affected to a much greater extent than the great German leader by the opinions of those around him. Liebknecht, in short, the student, thinker, philosopher, man of affairs; Jaurès the orator, the man of impulse, the inspired professor whom circumstances had drawn into politics. All who knew them would think of Liebknecht as the man of the Council Chamber: of Jaurès as the hero of the platform and the House of Assembly.
In the latter capacity no speaker of our day in any country has produced such great effects, or has been so ready to produce them, as Jaurès. The French deputies listen to him as if hypnotised, though the majority of them are generally at variance with the opinions he expresses. Hour after hour his cultured and well-chosen periods roll on, broken now and then by storms of passion, quieting down at times into the charm of literary discourse. Too wordy for the matter to suit the taste of the critical Anglo-Saxon, but so admirably phrased in French that highly educated men and women of the opposite side in politics crowd the Assembly to hear him speak, as they might go to listen to Bernhardt’s exquisite intonation and elocution in her prime. More than once he has held his entire political audience, friends and enemies alike, entranced by some marvellously brilliant passage dealing with science and art and literature and music, in their relation to the social and economic life of the time. On such occasions not a sound can be heard in all that large hall where the French deputies sit. Perfect silence reigns throughout, broken at the end only by rapturous applause from all the benches. His hearers recognise only at such a moment that they have been listening to lofty sentiments expressed in beautiful language, and they regard Jaurès the orator, regardless of his political and social heresies, as an honour to the country of their birth.
It would be absolutely impossible for an English speaker, no matter how powerful he might be, to hold the House of Commons in this way on any subject not immediately connected with the matter in hand, unless indeed he had something very interesting to say on racing or football, golf or cricket. The “tone of the House” in London is indeed in this respect as low as it can be. Any style which rises above the level of conversational twaddle is regarded as quite out of place. But with all Jaurès’s great eloquence he could not, at any period of his career, have delivered in the French Assembly, when challenged, on the spur of the moment, such a masterly exposition of our views, theories and proposals as Jules Guesde gave under those circumstances: a speech which, reported verbatim, is one of the best pamphlets of the International Socialist party to-day. To say the truth, I have never considered Jaurès’s knowledge of economics and sociology at all on a level with his other acquirements. On the other hand, his power of work is so colossal that quite probably he will one day astonish us all with some wonderful tour de force on these subjects.
I once had the misfortune, it was no less, to speak after Jaurès in French. This was at Brussels in the great Hall of the Maison du People. The place was packed with fully 10,000 people, and after one of Jaurès’s spirit-stirring orations, his fine voice ringing through the building like a trumpet, he sat down amid a perfect tempest of applause, the audience being worked up to the highest pitch of excitement. The chairman, Emile Vandervelde, when the cheers had subsided, called upon – me! I was never so taken aback in all my life. To have to address that tremendous audience in French, after the ablest orator in that language, was a task that it was far too bad of Vandervelde to set me. However, there was no time to reflect or to hesitate, so I did my best to fight for time. I told the Belgians they had no doubt heard of English “phlegm,” and I was happy to say I had come there provided with a good personal supply of that insular commodity, without which I certainly should not have dared to rise to address them after such a speech as that which they had just heard. And so, with a little more chaff of similar character, I contrived to get out in silence what I had to say. But no more of that for me.
Liebknecht and Jaurès took diametrically opposite views about Dreyfus. Jaurès, of course, was one of the most prominent agitators on the side of that unfortunate Jew – Dreyfusard, as the phrase then went, to the backbone. Liebknecht was the most convinced, not to say obstinate, anti-Dreyfusard I ever met. So my wife and I felt not a little bit anxious at what might happen when two such able and determined men, wholly at variance on the question of the day, were to be thrown together continuously. We need not have been troubled. Liebknecht’s cool and pleasant manner, Jaurès’s admirable good nature and good-fellowship met every difficulty with ease; though the burning subject was frequently discussed between them, and had a curious habit, as such subjects have, of coming up at the most unexpected times.
Was Dreyfus a German spy or was he not? I agreed with Jaurès that he was not, and, whether he was or not, we argued that he had been most unfairly condemned and tortured because he was a Jew, because he devoted himself to his profession, because he was very clever, and because, above all, he stood in the way of the political intrigues of the clerical military staff. Besides, he was a rich man, and there was no earthly reason why he should have been a spy.
This is not the place to go all over the Dreyfus case again, but it is perhaps worth while to put the other side as Liebknecht put it. “I have been in prison during the whole of the time the trial has been going on at Rennes,” he told Jaurès in French, “and I have read every word of the verbatim report in the Temps day by day as it appeared. I have not missed a word. I have no prejudice whatever against Jews of any kind. Some of my dearest friends have been Jews, and some of the men I most admire were Jews. Lassalle was a Jew, Heine was a Jew, Marx was a Jew, Kautsky is a Jew, Bernstein is a Jew, Singer is a Jew. I knew them, and have worked in the closest possible intimacy with all of them. Moreover, I am not a man to hold to an opinion because I have once formed it, if I see reason to change. But the more I read of this Dreyfus business the more satisfied I became that he was a spy.” He gave many reasons for this decision. And then he added, “You may believe me implicitly when I tell you that there is a secret but loyal understanding between all civilised Governments to the effect that if an innocent man is by accident arrested as a spy, a notification is at once sent to that effect. I know positively, and as a matter of fact, that the German Government sent no such notification in Dreyfus’s case. Why? Because they could not do so. He may have been playing a double game, and leading the German Government on for purely patriotic purposes. I know nothing about that. It is a very difficult thing to prove, as you must see. But that he did give secret information away I have no doubt whatever.”
Neither Jaurès nor myself was shaken at the time. But since then I have become not so sure as I was at the moment that Liebknecht was wrong. First, how is it that all Dreyfus’s most earnest supporters, including his brave counsel M. Labori, have cut him? Secondly, how did it happen that nearly all those who went to Rennes from England strongly prejudiced in Dreyfus’s favour came back more or less against him. One old friend of mine, an officer of distinction, who was quite certain of his innocence when he left for Rennes told me, “All I can say is, Hyndman, the impression the man produced upon me was that if he was not a spy, it was not for want of a natural turn that way.”
But our conversations during that, to me, interesting time, covered a very much wider field than the Dreyfus question, wide as that was, with all its innumerable complications and side issues. The relations between Germany and France, between France and England, – then by no means so happy as they are now, – between Germany and England, the Colonial system and the changes coming in Eastern Europe and in Asia were all discussed, while Liebknecht gave us most interesting accounts of the old men of the movement, from the days of 1848 onwards.
One thing I noticed then and recall vividly now. Liebknecht was much more afraid of the German Government, and much more opposed to its external policy than was Jaurès. He knew Prussian policy and Hohenzollern ambitions too well to be hopeful. He saw pan-Germanism and unscrupulous militarism coming to the front to an extent which Jaurès then and always failed to appreciate. I remember well his saying, “Strange as it may seem to you, Germany as a whole has not long recovered from the Thirty Years’ War. She is now getting proud of her growing strength which, since the war against France, has been turned into an industrial, prior to developing in a military, direction. With the exception of us Social-Democrats, Germany to-day is a Germany of war not of peace, and unless we make way very rapidly you may live to see some extraordinary changes.” I do not say that Liebknecht foresaw what has since occurred, or that he anticipated the direct challenge to British naval power which has now been thrown down; but he certainly took a much less favourable view of Germany as an influence in favour of peace than it was then the fashion to take in our political circles.
Liebknecht was an old man when he died in harness, from sheer overwork which he ought not to have undertaken. He sent me his framed photograph signed shortly before his death, which I shall ever cherish as a memento of a noble character who devoted his great abilities throughout his life to the service of mankind. Jaurès, happily, is still with us, and though I not unfrequently differ much from his policy – and cannot for the life of me comprehend his pro-Germanism, his support of the English Capitalist-Liberal Party, or his defence of sabotage – I shall never cease to respect and admire his indefatigable work in our cause. It has been one of the great privileges of my long life to have enjoyed the intimate friendship of two such men.
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Last updated on 30.7.2006