Or let us consider the matter from another point of view. It is now about half a century since the socialist agitation began in Germany. During that time the German workmen have received an education in social politics such as no university in the world can furnish. They have been accustomed to the freest and most thorough discussion of the widest variety of topics in books and pamphlets, at public meetings and debates, in private talks over their beer and coffee. Great strikes, elections, and demonstrations have been object-lessons to them of the most vivid and forcible description. A new move on the part of the Kaiser, a new speech of Bebel or Liebknecht has given fresh food for reflection and discourse. Above all, the matters so handled have come near to their hearts, have touched them in their everyday life in the closest and most real way. They were no hearsay, conventional, or traditional subjects that thus appealed to them! Need we wonder that the teaching of Marx, Lassalle, and Engels has become a possession to them, a theme for mind and heart? The seed has taken root among millions of men and women remarkable for intelligence, thoroughness, and earnestness. And the process that has thus gone on in Germany goes on more or less all over the world. The men and women of the labouring democracy, let us remember, have, many of them, known hunger and privation in every form, not only as an exceptionally severe occurrence in times of strike and unemployment, but as a chronic experience. Mothers have been obliged to work hard too long before child-bearing, and too soon after it, to eke out a scanty family income. For a society that has shown so little respect even for the sacred function of motherhood, what can we say but that it is time to repent? The children in the same competitive society have cried for bread when there was none to give them, and have not had rags enough decently to cover their nakedness. In a moment of feeling at the Jena meeting of his party Bebel confessed that for years it was his ideal for once to eat his fill of bread and butter. During the sieges of Kimberley and Mafeking our countrymen had a new experience; they found out what it meant never to have enough to eat, to be always hungry. The leader of one of the strongest organisations in the world, one of the foremost orators in Europe, to whom all men listen when he makes a speech, had the experience for years in the very heart of modern civilisation.