I said "alone." Yet this is not fair to a very small group of German minority socialists, who stood by Liebknecht and by whom Liebknecht stood. Among them were Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Hugo Haase, George Ledebour, and others, to whom, were real heroism always decorated, would be given a higher order of "Pour le Merite." But among all these Karl Liebknecht stands preeminent. "And for all that mind you," concludes the French soldier Bertrand, in "Under Fire," "there is one figure that has risen above the war and will blaze with the beauty and strength of his courage." Barbusse continues: "I listened leaning on a stick towards him, drinking in the voice that came in the twilight silence from the lips that so rarely spoke. He cried with a clear voice, 'Liebknecht.'" WALTER WEYL. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE "_The future belongs to the people._" The time was October 24, 1918; the place, Berlin, the center of Germany; the speaker, Doctor Karl Liebknecht. A remarkable change had indeed come over the Empire. As far as the eye could reach, a great shouting, surging crowd had gathered before the Reichstag buildings, a crowd such as might have foregathered in times past on almost any day of national festivity, to do honor to his Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm. They were indeed shouting frantically on this occasion, but with other sentiments, shouting not for the Kaiser, but for abdication, while applauding frantically for another, a bitter foe of the Kaiser, a man who had been sent to jail for high treason, had been deprived of his seat in the Reichstag, had been dubbed, even by those in his own party, an enemy of his kind--Karl Liebknecht. And who, witnessing the flower-laden carriage of the great popular hero, but would admit that a new day was at last dawning in that land of autocracy, a day ushered in by the guns and men of Foch? The events leading to that ovation of the twenty-fourth of October are of interest.