In Germany there has grown into recognition a social movement which, at the beginning, was conducted in the spirit of both Marx and Lassalle, but which soon came under the control of pure Marxism. I recall the following stages of development. When thirty-two years ago the deadly bullet struck Lassalle in Geneva, that man was removed who alone had represented the German working-men's movement; and what he left behind was next to nothing. His "Working-Men's Union" numbered only four thousand six hundred and ten members at the moment when he closed his eyes. So also immediately after Lassalle's death the agitation was nothing more than a useless and petty strife. It was a coterie rather than a social party. Thus the field in Germany was open for the development of a new social-democratic movement from another source. This was started in 1864 by Wilhelm Liebknecht, who came to Germany as the direct envoy of Karl Marx, and with strong belief in his ideas; the purpose was to establish the working-men's movement upon a basis other than that of Lassalle. He won to this cause the youthful energy of the master-turner August Bebel, who, at the age of twenty-four, was already the leader of a number of working-men's unions which had been until that time in advanced radicalism. These are the organisations, you know, which in the year 1868, in Nuremberg, seceded from Schulze to Marx. Fourteen thousand working men were represented. The resolution through which this transfer was accomplished was drawn by Liebknecht and was inspired by the Marxian spirit. Thus in 1868 a new social party was formed in Germany which took the name of the Social-Democratic Working-Men's Party, and which, after the congress in Eisenach, stood for a time alone as the so-called "Honorables," until in the year 1875 the union of the Lassalle and the Bebel faction was accomplished in Gotha. Since that time, as you know, the one "Social-Democratic Party" exists. It is significant that the present union rests upon a compromise between Lassalle and Marx, but is really directed by the Marxists, who step by step have won control in the party. The "Gotha" programme remained as the platform of the movement in Germany for sixteen years; and not until the year 1891 was it replaced by a new platform, the "Erfurt" programme, which now constitutes the confession of faith of the Social-Democratic movement in Germany. It is pervaded by a strongly Marxian spirit and contains essentially only a statement of Marxian doctrines in accordance with the spirit of the age. Let me in a few words present merely the lines of thought in this programme. It begins with the phrases: