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226 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
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-yearslong
torture of a great party, in which every man who
was known to be sympathetic was looked upon as a crim-
effort made to
inal and an outlaw. Yet, despite every
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,
should have
despite the most barbarous persecution, they
been able to hold their forces together, to restrain their