Turning now to the struggle for existence of the socialist parties of the various countries, there is one story that is far too important in the history of socialism to be passed over. It was a magnificent battle against the terrorists above and the terrorists below, that ended in complete victory for the socialists. Strangely enough, the greatest provocation to violence that has ever confronted the labor movement and the greatest opportunity that was ever offered to anarchy occurred in precisely that country where it was least expected. Nowhere else in all Europe had socialism made such advances as in Germany; and nowhere else was the movement so well organized, so intelligently led, or so clear as to its aims and methods. An immense agitation had gone on during the entire sixties, and working-class organizations were springing up everywhere. Besides possessing the greatest theorists of socialism, Marx and Engels, the German movement was rich indeed in having in its service three such matchless agitators as Lassalle, Bebel, and Liebknecht. Lassalle certainly had no peer, and those who have written of him exhaust superlatives in their efforts to describe this prodigy. He, also, was a product of that hero-producing period of '48. He had been arrested in Duesseldorf at the same time that Marx and his circle had been arrested at Cologne. He was then only twenty-three years of age. Yet his defense of his actions in court is said to have been a masterpiece. Even the critic George Brandes has spoken of it as the most wonderful example of manly courage and eloquence in a youth that the history of the world has given us. Precocious as a child, proud and haughty as a youth, gifted with a critical, penetrating, and brilliant mind, and moved by an ambition that knew no bounds, Lassalle, with all his powerful passion and dramatic talents, could not have been other than a great figure. When a man possesses qualities that call forth the wonder of Heine, Humboldt, Bismarck, and Brandes, when Bakounin calls him a "giant," and even George Meredith turns to him as a personality almost unequaled in fiction and makes a novel out of his career, the plain ordinary world may gain some conception of this "father of the German labor movement." This is no place to deal with certain deplorable and contradictory phases of his life nor even with some of his mad dreams that led Bismarck, after saying that "he was one of the most intellectual and gifted men with whom I have ever had intercourse, ..." to add "and it was perhaps a matter of doubt to him whether the German Empire would close with the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Lassalle dynasty."[14] Such was the proud, unruly, ambitious spirit of the man, who, in 1862, came actively to voice the claims of labor.