Trained in the school of adversity, the German Social Democratic party has been obliged to learn circumspection and to acquire all the virtues of discipline, patience, sobriety, and self-control. Some of its members, among whom Most and Hasselman were prominent, strongly urged a policy of anarchic resistance to authority, but this tendency was strenuously opposed by the vast majority. Most and Hasselman, on refusing to submit to the party discipline, were eventually expelled. Every attempt to encourage the theory or practice of anarchism in the German Social Democratic party has been sternly and almost unanimously suppressed by the party. It succeeded only to a slight degree in cases where it was promoted by the agents of the German police for their own evil ends. A most wholesome effect of the adverse experience of the Social Democratic party was that it sifted from their ranks all who were not thoroughly in earnest in the cause of the working man. It is a grave misfortune of new movements like socialism that it attracts from the middle and upper classes all manner of faddists and crotchety enthusiasts and adventurers, vapid and futile talkers, acrid and morbid pessimists, who join the movement, not from real love of the cause, but because it gives them an opportunity to scheme and harangue, and to lash out at the vices of the existing society. From this dangerous class the German Social Democratic party was saved by the anti-socialist legislation at a time when socialism was becoming fashionable. It is a most significant feature in the development of the German Social Democracy that it has attained to its present advanced position without the help of any leader of commanding talent. It has had many loyal chiefs. For over fifty years, during which exile, privation, discouragement, prosecution, and imprisonment were followed by a season of comparative triumph, Liebknecht was at all times the consistent and unflinching champion of the revolutionary cause. Bebel’s service for the working man now extends to about forty years, and has been not less consistent and courageous. Many others, such as Hasenclever, Auer, and Vollmar, have served with ability for many years. But none of those named can be considered men of remarkable gifts. Bernstein and Kautsky, who may be described as the leading theorists of the party in recent years, have shown wide knowledge, judgment, and clearness of vision, but they would be the last to lay claim to the endowments that give Marx and Lassalle their high place in the history of the working class. These things being so, we must regard the German Social Democracy as a movement which owes its rise no doubt to the initiative of two men of original force, but which in its development finds its basis in the minds and hearts of the proletariat of the Fatherland.