"Socialism," he concluded, "cannot accept a share of power; it is obliged to wait for all of the power." The Amsterdam resolution, passed by a large majority after this debate, was almost identical with that which had been adopted by a vote of 288 to 11 at the German Congress at Dresden in the previous year (1903), and although the Austrian delegates and others, nearly half the total, had expressed a preference for a substitute of a more moderate character, they did not hesitate, when this motion was defeated, to indorse the more radical one that was finally adopted. And in 1909, when this Dresden (or Amsterdam) resolution came up for discussion at the German Congress of Leipzig, it was unanimously reaffirmed. Those opposing it did not dare to dispute it at all in principle, but merely expressed the mental reservation that it was qualified by another resolution adopted at a recent Congress which had declared that the party should be absolutely free to decide the question of _temporary_ political alliances in _elections_. As such electoral combinations, valid only for the _second ballot_, and lapsing immediately after the elections, had always been common, the Dresden resolution was never meant by the majority of those voting for it to forbid them. Its purpose was only to insist that the object of the Socialists must always be social revolution and not reform, since, to use its own words, supreme political power "cannot be obtained step by step." "The Congress condemns most emphatically," the Dresden resolution declared, "the revisionist attempt to alter our hitherto victorious policy, a policy based upon the class struggle; just as in the past _we shall go on achieving power by conquering our enemies, not by compromising with the existing order of things_." (My italics.) In a recent letter widely quoted by the continental press, August Bebel contended that in Germany at least the Social Democracy and the other political parties have grown farther and farther apart during the last fifty years. While Bebel claims that Socialists support every form of progress, he insists that nevertheless they remain fundamentally opposed even to the Liberal parties, for the reason, as he explained at the Jena Congress (1905), that "_an opposition party can, on the whole, have no decisive influence until it gains control of the government_," that until the Socialists themselves have a majority, governments could be controlled only by an alliance with non-Socialist parties. "If you (the Socialist Party) want to have that kind of an influence," said Bebel, "then stick your program in your pocket, leave the standpoint of your principles, concern yourself only with purely practical things, and you will be cordially welcome as allies." (Italics mine.) At the Nuremburg Congress (1908) he said: "We shall reach our goal, not through little concessions, through creeping on the ground, and coming down to the