"The enemy who comes to us with an open visor we face with a smile; to set our feet upon his neck is mere play for us. The stupidly brutal acts of violence of police politicians, the outrages of anti-Socialist laws, penitentiary bills--these only arouse feelings of pitying contempt; the enemy, however, that reaches out the hand to us for a political alliance, and intrudes himself upon us as a friend and a brother,--_him and him alone have we to fear_. "Our fortress can withstand every assault--it cannot be stormed nor taken from us by siege--it can only fall _when we ourselves open the doors to the enemy and take him into our ranks as a fellow comrade_." "We shall almost never go right," says Liebknecht, "if we do what our enemies applaud." And we find, as a matter of fact, that the enemies of Socialism never fail to applaud any tendency of the party to compromise those acting principles that have brought it to the point it has now reached. For Liebknecht shows that the power which now causes a Socialist alliance to be sought after in some countries even by Socialism's most bitter enemies would never have arisen had the party not clung closely to its guiding principle, the policy of "no compromise." There is no difficulty in showing, from the public life and opinion of our day, how widespread is this spirit of political compromise or opportunism; nor in proving that it enters into the conduct of many Socialists. Such an opposition to the effective application of broad and far-sighted plans to practical politics is especially common, for historical reasons, in Great Britain and the United States. In this country it has been especially marked in Milwaukee from the earliest days of the Socialist movement there. In 1893 the _Milwaukee Vorwaerts_ announced that "if you demand too much at one time you are likely not to get anything," and that "nothing more ought to be demanded but what is attainable at a given time and under given circumstances."[99] It will be noticed that this is a clear expression of a principle of action diametrically opposite to that adopted by the international movement as stated by Bebel and Liebknecht. Socialists are chiefly distinguished from the other parties by the fact that they concentrate their attention on demands beyond "what is attainable at a given time and under given circumstances." They might _attempt_ to distinguish themselves by claiming that they stand for the _ultimate_ goal of Socialism, though their immediate program is the same as that of other parties, but any politician can do that--as has been shown recently by the action of Briand, Millerand, Ferri, and other former Socialists in France and Italy--and the day seems near when hosts of politicians will follow their example.