"What will the Kaiser do?" asked the Berlin _Vorwaerts_ in its leading Article on the last day of October. The article voiced a question which all but the most extreme reactionaries had been asking for two weeks. Even men devoted to the monarch personally and themselves convinced monarchists in principle realized that the only hope of securing a just peace lay in sacrificing Kaiser Wilhelm. Scheidemann, the Socialist Secretary of State, wrote to Chancellor Prince Max, declaring that the Kaiser must retire, and that his letter had been written "in agreement with the leaders of the Socialist party and its representatives in the Reichstag." Up to the time of the publication of the _Vorwaerts_ leader the authorities had forbidden any public discussion of the Kaiser's abdication. The censorship restrictions on this subject were now removed and the press was permitted to discuss it freely. But while many of the party leaders were already inwardly convinced that the supreme sacrifice of abdication must be made by the Kaiser, none of the Empire's political parties except the two Socialist parties considered it politically expedient to make the demand. Even the Progressives, farthest to the left of all the _bourgeois_ parties, not only refused to follow the Socialists' lead, but went on record as opposed to abdication. At a convention of the party in Greater Berlin on November 6th, Dr. Mugdan, one of the party's prominent Reichstag deputies, reporting the attitude of the party on the question of abdication, said: "The Progressives do not desire to sow further unrest and confusion among the German people." This was the attitude of a majority of the leaders among the people. It was dictated less by loyalty to the sovereign than by a realization that the disintegrating propaganda of the Internationalists had affected so large a part of the people that the abdication of the Kaiser would almost inevitably bring the collapse of the state. They could not yet realize that this collapse was inevitable in any case, nor that the number of those devoted to the Kaiser was comparatively so small that it was of little consequence whether he remained on the throne or abdicated. The Kaiser himself, as will be seen later,[22] was mainly moved by the same considerations. He believed chaos would certainly follow his abdication. It is also far from improbable that he had not yet abandoned all hope of military victory. The German army leaders, in trying to deceive the people into a belief that a successful termination of the war was still possible, had doubtless deceived their monarch as well. Possibly they had even deceived themselves. Field Marshal von Hindenburg sent a message to the press on November 3d, wherein he declared: "Our honor, freedom and future are now at stake. We are invincible if we are united. If the German army be strongly supported by the will of the people, our Fatherland will brave all onslaughts."