In his speech in the Reichstag of September 17, 1878, the Chancellor also explained the origin of his hostility to the Social Democracy. One of its leading representatives, either Bebel or Liebknecht, had in open sitting expressed his sympathy with the Commune at Paris. That reference to the Commune had been a ray of light on the question; from that time he felt entirely convinced that the Social Democracy was an enemy against which the State and society must arm themselves. As we have seen, it was Bebel who had used the objectionable language in the Reichstag; but Liebknecht had never been backward in the frank and uncompromising expression of views of a similar nature. Such views were not the passing feeling of the hour; they were the statement of firm and settled conviction, and may fairly be taken as representative of the beliefs and convictions of the German Social Democracy in general. The Social Democrats were hostile to the existing order in Germany, and they did not hesitate to say so. In these circumstances it is hardly necessary to say that a collision with a Government like that directed by Bismarck was inevitable. Bismarck himself was a Prussian Junker who had become a great European statesman, but in many ways he remained a Junker to the end of his life. With rare sagacity and strength of will he had shaped the real forces of his time towards the great end of uniting the Fatherland and restoring it to its fitting place among the nations of Europe. To use his own words, he had lifted Germany into the saddle, and his task afterwards was to keep her there. The methods, however, by which he had accomplished the first part of his task, were scarcely so suitable for the accomplishment of the second. In the now united Germany he found two enemies which appeared to menace the new structure which he had so laboriously reared, the Black International, or the Ultramontane party, and the Red International, or the Social Democrats. These enemies he tried to suppress by the high-handed methods which had been familiar to him from his youth. He was about fifty-six years of age when the German Empire was established. It was too much to expect of human nature that he should at so late a time of life break away from his antecedents as Prussian Junker and statesman, and adopt the methods which would make Germany a free as well as a united State.