Lassalle was shortly afterwards killed in a duel over a love-affair, but he was canonized by the German Social Democrats as though his death were a martyrdom. Even Bismarck in the Reichstag paid a tribute to his memory. Lassalle died just about the time that a change was occurring in his convictions, and had he lived longer, and if contemporary history is to be believed, he would have taken office under the German Government and applied himself heartily to the building up of the Empire. [Illustration: LOUISE MICHEL.] After Lassalle’s death the movement which he had initiated went forward with increased force. The German laborer was finally, as the Internationalists put it, aroused. The German Empire, following the example of the Bund, decreed universal suffrage in 1871. Before this, in Prussia especially, the laborer had but the smallest political influence. The vote of a man in the wealthiest class in Berlin counted for as much as the vote of fifteen of the “proletariat,” so called. Lassalle died in 1864, and suffrage was first granted in 1867. The Social Democrats at first were in close accord with Bismarck. It was the Social Democratic vote which elected Bismarck to the Reichstag in the first election after the suffrage was granted. In the fall of 1867 they sent eight members to the parliament of the Bund. In the elections after the formation of the Empire the Socialistic vote stood: In 1871, 123,975; in 1874, 351,952; in 1877, 493,288; in 1878, 437,158. The Social Democrats poll nearly 10 per cent of the whole vote of Germany at the present time. In 1878 occurred the two attempts on the life of the Emperor of Germany described in a succeeding chapter, and the result was severe repressive measures against the Social Democrats. Their vote fell off, and their influence declined, but in the past two years, 1887 and 1888, they have more than recovered their past strength, and they now poll more votes and seem to exercise a greater political control in Germany than ever before. [Illustration: FERDINAND LASSALLE.] The passage of the “Ausnahmsgesetz,” the exceptional law against German Socialists, drove many of them to this country, but had no effect in diminishing the propaganda in Germany. The result was an exodus of Socialists, or rather Anarchists, to America—by this time the two terms, wide apart as they may seem, had become one—and to Chicago came most of the irreconcilable ones. The American sympathizers, thus formed, at first fixed their attention upon the political situation in the old country, and they applied themselves closely to work in connection with the agitators who had not expatriated themselves. Money was sent in large quantities to the old country.