That night was a glorious one for the socialists, as well as a very dreadful one for Bismarck and those others who had made prodigious but futile efforts to destroy socialism. Berlin was already a socialist stronghold, and its entire people that night came into the streets to sing songs of thanksgiving. Streets, parks, public places, cafes, theaters were filled with merrymakers, rejoicing with songs, with toasts to the leading socialists, and with boisterous welcomes to the exiles who were returning. All night long the red flag waved, and the Marseillaise was sung, as all that passion of love, enthusiasm, and devotion for a great cause, which, for twelve long years, had been brutally suppressed, burst forth in floods of joy. "He [Bismarck] has had at his entire disposal for more than a quarter of a century," said Liebknecht, "the police, the army, the capital, and the power of the State--in brief, all the means of mechanical force. _We had only our just right, our firm conviction, our bared breasts to oppose him with, and it is we who have conquered! Our arms were the best. In the course of time brute power must yield to the moral factors, to the logic of things._ Bismarck lies crushed to the earth--and social democracy is the strongest party in Germany!... _The essence of revolution lies not in the means, but in the end. Violence has been, for thousands of years, a reactionary factor._"[35] Certainly, the moral victory was immense. There had been a twelve-years-long torture of a great party, in which every man who was known to be sympathetic was looked upon as a criminal and an outlaw. Yet, despite every effort made to drive the socialists into outrages, they never wavered the slightest from their grim determination to depend solely upon peaceable methods. It is indeed marvelous that the German socialists should have stood the test and that, despite the most barbarous persecution, they should have been able to hold their forces together, to restrain their natural anger, and to keep their faith in the ultimate victory of peaceable, legal, and political methods. Prometheus, bound to his rock and tortured by all the furies of a malignant Jupiter, did not rise superior to his tormentor with more grandeur than did the social democracy of Germany.