However, Lassalle and Bismarck had formed a general liking for each other, and the great minister received from the brilliant agitator many suggestions which he later embodied in his state insurance laws. Both Bismarck and Lassalle believed in the power of the state for the amelioration of social conditions. They met several times at the Chancellor's solicitation, and Bismarck disclosed their conversations to the Reichstag, on the insistence of Bebel, when the insurance bills were under discussion. The Chancellor expressed his admiration for the virility of the Socialist's mind and said he believed Lassalle perfectly sincere in his purpose.[8] Lassalle did not live to see his General Workingmen's Association ("Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeitsverein") attain political power. He was killed in a duel over a love affair August 31, 1864. His brilliant campaign for democracy had resulted in a petty organization of 4,610 members. Lassalle's influence is increasing every year. His death-day is celebrated by the German Socialists (Lassalle Feier). The present-day German movement is Lassallian rather than Marxian.[9] In a letter to Rodbertus, February, 1864, Lassalle says that he aimed to show the workingman "how identical the economic and the political forces are. Every separation of them is an abstraction, and I believe that uniting the two is the principal potency which I can give to the cause." II The little handful was soon rent by internal strife and threatened with utter extinction, both by police aggression and by Marxian competition. The year Lassalle died the International Workingman's Association was organized and agitation began in Germany under the leadership of William Liebknecht, a friend and disciple of Marx. Liebknecht was the scholar of the early Social Democratic group. He possessed a university education, was a revolutionist in 1848, a fugitive in Switzerland and England until 1862. His foreign sojourn did not mellow his natural dogmatism; on the contrary, his long intercourse with Marx in London hardened his orthodoxy. He was a powerful polemist. However, alone he could not have organized a national movement. He did not possess the personal traits that lure. He made a notable convert when he won August Bebel, a Saxon woodturner, to his cause. "I was Saul and became Paul," Bebel said to me. The words are not inapt: his power is Pauline. Lie has been persecuted and imprisoned, has written speeches and epistles, has made many missionary journeys, and kept constantly in intimate touch with every local phase of his propaganda. His imprisonments have undermined his health, but they have not diminished his mental vigor; and more than once the Iron Chancellor winced under his ferocious assaults.