But an increasingly important part of the working class, attracted by the ardent propaganda of the theoreticians of the Councils system, physically and mentally depressed by misery and unemployment, irritated by the mistakes of the Cabinet and disillusioned by the impotence of the Assembly of Weimar, rallied to the doctrines of the Councils. The Trades Unions were no longer believed by them able to lead the battle which would assure to the workers the preponderant rôle which should be theirs in economic matters. They showed during the war, co-operating with the militarists and the bureaucrats of the Empire, that they were always ready to compromise. They were directed by veritable functionaries, whose whole careers developed within the Trades Union administration and who had no qualification for representing the working class. In order to secure what the working class wants these claims must be taken in hand by organs issuing directly from the workers--militant organizations in position to lead a swift energetic fight--these organs being the Workers Councils. _The Councils must be placed above the unions_, and it is to them that belongs the right to decide on the campaigns that should be waged. Between these two opposite conceptions there arose an intermediate theory. The trades unionists of the later school and the Christian Trades Unionists, energetically as they rejected all economic dictatorship by the Councils, held, however, that there is something just and legitimate in such theories. Giesbert, who holds an important situation in the Christian Trades Unions and who was to be Minister of Posts, wrote in April: “We have not sufficiently appreciated and above all we have realized too late the degree of sound truth in the idea of the Councils. The reason for this is that this idea has come to us from Russia as a political conception, and also because it arrived accompanied by all the tragic manifestations of the Russian Revolution. If the system of Councils assures to the workers the right to participate more completely in the organization and development of economic life, then it cannot help but contribute, if this is done in a reasonable manner, to the reawakening of the love of work and the establishment of a close community of interests between employers and employés.”[60] As for the Cabinet, it declared itself from the first against the Councils, and in an official communication on February 26, 1919, Scheidemann, President of the Council of Ministers, declared that the Cabinet never considered the introduction of the Councils System in Germany, and that above all, if any part should be accorded the Councils, it could only be that of an intermediary between the employers and the trade unions.