It was quite in the nature of things, then, that the body of Socialist deputies, instead of raising an outcry against the war, should have voted as one man for the military credits demanded by the Chancellor on the 4th of August, and that it should have accepted without a murmur the Government’s statements as to an attack by Russia and by France. In spite of some individual protests, it will continue to grant the necessary milliards of marks, just as its electors, enrolled under the Imperial banner, will continue to shed their proletarian blood like water, in order to secure the triumph of imperialism and aristocracy. Still, we have a right to be astonished when we read the pronouncements made at Stuttgart last winter by one of the prominent Socialist members of the Reichstag, Herr Wolfgang Heine. They reveal a new trend in the party, a rallying to the Empire and to those great centralizing forces, the clamps of the mighty German framework—the army and the monarchy. Conservative writers had given us to understand that a yawning chasm had always existed and always would exist between kingship and social democracy. The Imperial Government would not disarm until its enemy surrendered and swore allegiance to the monarchy and to the order of things for which the monarchy stands. And now, through the agency of war, the miracle has come to pass! Social democracy will no longer sap the dynastic and military foundations of the State; it has declared itself imperialistic. Will the miracle last long? Will the old revolutionary demon never again seize the soul of the new convert? When peace returns—we shall see. There is every reason to think that the truce between the two inveterate foes rests on an uncertain basis. As the price of its assistance in the European conflict, Socialism will exact concessions in the shape of political reforms, involving a change in the Imperial constitution and in that of the Prussian State. The grant of universal suffrage to Prussia is the least that it can ask for. Then will come the day of reckoning for the Hohenzollern autocrat. Let us suppose that William II., his position weakened by a disappointing war, should find no strength to resist the clamours of the German proletariate. The power would pass from his enfeebled hands to those of a Reichstag brimming over with enthusiasm and consumed with ambition. And if, in spite of the failure of his bold enterprises, he should reject the popular demands, what a struggle we can foresee between a shrunken Cæsar and a party swollen in numbers through all the mistakes, all the suffering, all the ruin that the war has accumulated! Victory alone (and even that for how long, and by what compromises?) could seal the reconciliation between two such rivals as autocracy and Socialism. Defeat, or merely a profitless peace, would have prolonged effects upon the internal situation in Germany. VII.