Police precautions against the Russian agents, combined with a Press propaganda against the Spartacists, provoked the latter to action. They seized the offices of the _Vorwärts_ and other papers most offensive to them, and used them for publishing their own pamphlets. They had not apparently planned anything more than a demonstration, and did not anyhow exploit the success they had seized by surprise. The Government, however, after some difficulty in concentrating and supplying sufficient troops, converted the "putsch" into a pitched battle. Noske regulars with all the machinery of modern war, made short work of the half-hearted half-armed irregulars of Eichhorn, the Spartacist Police Commissioner. The revolution was crushed in Berlin and driven back to the coast ports, whence it came and whither it could later be pursued. Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, its Berlin leaders, were arrested and at once brutally murdered by their escort with the approval and assistance of the officers in charge. This murder, perfectly well known in Berlin at the time, was only proved by court-martial four months later, after which the culprits were allowed to escape abroad. So the Independents having committed hari-kari and the Spartacists being hoist with their own petard, middle-class and moderate Germany heaved a sigh of relief, and hoped that the bogey of Bolshevism was buried. The elections to the National Assembly were held a few days later without disturbance, and the German revolution entered its third and last phase. The German revolution which began in November--in old German the "Month of Fogs"--and ended in February--the "Month of Fools"--was fogged from the beginning and fooled to the end. Its third and last phase began about the middle of January with the establishing of provisional government by the moderate Majority Socialists, the crushing of Spartacus, and the elections. The radical opposition had tried to delay the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, partly because it was for the moment discredited by its secession from the Coalition and its connection with the Communists, and partly because it recognised that a reaction towards nationalism and conservatism had already been set up by the attitude of the Allies and would be given exaggerated expression at the polls. The drift of a weakened and wearied mass can raise a dictator to "save society"; only the driving power of a devoted and determined minority can realise a social revolution. But the Independents had missed their opportunity of seizing power and securing such foreign support for the revolution as they had earned by their attitude on the war. Their subsequent policy of obstruction had as little success as it deserved.