"Look at Belgium!" cries the _Verwärts_ to encourage the workmen-soldiers. The People’s Houses there have been changed into army hospitals, the newspapers suppressed, all Party life crushed out.⁵ And therefore hold out until the end, "until the decisive victory is ours." In other words, keep on destroying, let the work of your own hands be a terrifying lesson to you. "Look at Belgium," and out of this terror draw courage for renewed destruction. ⁵ A sentimental correspondent of the _Vorwärts_ writes that he was looking for Belgian comrades in the _Maison du Peuple_ and found a German army hospital there. And what did the _Vorwärts_ correspondent want of his Belgian comrades? "_To win them to the cause of the German people_--just when Brussels itself had been won ’for the cause of the German people!’" What has just been said refers not to the German Social Democracy alone, but also to all the older branches of the International that have lived through the history of the last half century. CHAPTER X WORKING CLASS IMPERIALISM There is one factor in the collapse of the Second International that is still unclarified. It dwells at the heart of all the events that the Party has passed through. The dependence of the proletarian class movement, particularly in its economic conflicts, upon the scope and the successes of the imperialistic policy of the state is a question which, as far as I know, has never been discussed in the Socialist press. Nor can I attempt to solve it in the short space of this work. So what I shall say on this point will necessarily be in the nature of a brief review. The proletariat is deeply interested in the development of the forces of production. The national state created in Europe by the revolutions and wars of the years 1789 to 1870 was the basic type of the economic evolution of the past period. The proletariat contributed by its entire conscious policy to the development of the forces of production on a national foundation. It supported the bourgeoisie in its conflicts with alien enemies for national liberation; also in its conflicts with the monarchy, with feudalism and the church for political democracy. And in the measure in which the bourgeois turned to "law and order," that is, became reactionary, the proletariat assumed the historical task it left uncompleted. In championing a policy of peace, culture and democracy, as against the bourgeoisie, it contributed to the enlargement of the national market, and so gave an impetus to the development of the forces of production.