And what is the present organization of the Social Democratic Party? It is the most perfect party machine in the world. It is organized with the most scrupulous regard for details and oiled with the exuberance of a class spirit that is emerging from its narrowness and is finding room for its expanding powers in the practical affairs of national and municipal life. The only approach to it is the faultless, silently moving, highly polished mechanism devised by the English gentry to control the political destinies of the British Empire. Our American parties are crude compared with the noiseless efficacy of the English machine, or the remorseless yet enthusiastic and entirely effective operation of the German Social Democracy. Every detail of the workingman's life is embraced in this remarkable political organization. Every village and commune has its party vigilance committee. A juvenile department brings up the youth in the principles of the Social Democracy. The party press includes seventy-six daily papers, some of them brilliantly edited, a humorous weekly, and several monthly magazines. This press co-operates with the trade journals. Some of these--notably the masons' journal and the ironworkers' journal--have a vast circulation, numbering many hundred thousand subscribers. The party propaganda is stupendous. In 1910 over 14,000 meetings were held, and over 33,000,000 circulars and 2,800,000 brochures were distributed. Every workingman, every voter, was personally solicited during the campaign just closed (January, 1912). Committees and sub-committees were everywhere in this national beehive of workers. Women and children were enlisted in the work. The national party is controlled by an executive committee, elected by the national convention, who govern its many activities with the gravity of a college faculty, the astuteness of a lawyer, and the frugality of a tradesman. They issue annual reports, as full of statistics and involved analyses as a government report. And they have no patience for party stars who are ambitious to move in the orbit of their own individual greatness. Because the keynote of the party is solidarity, which is a synonym for discipline, "We have no factions, we are one. Personally any Social Democrat may believe as he pleases and do as he pleases. But when it comes to political activity, we insist that he act with the party." These are the words in which one of the younger leaders of the party explained their unity to me. In 1890, when the Bavarian rebels were under discussion in the national congress, Bebel told the delegates that "a fighting party such as our Social Democracy can only achieve its aims when every member observes the strictest discipline."[7]