The best means of making committees innocuous, which either did nothing or cooked up impracticable decisions, was to give them some real work to do. It was then amusing to see how the members would silently fade away and were soon nowhere to be found. It made me think of that great institution of the same kind, the Reichstag. How quickly they would evanesce if they were put to some real work instead of talking, especially if each member were made personally responsible for the work assigned to him.

I always demanded that, just as in private life so also in the movement, one should not tire of seeking until the best and honestest and manifestly the most competent person could be found for the position of leader or administrator in each section of the movement. Once installed in his position he was given absolute authority and full freedom of action towards his subordinates and full responsibility towards his superiors. Nobody was placed in a position of authority towards his subordinates unless he himself was competent in the work entrusted to them. In the course of two years I brought my views more and more into practice; so that to-day, at least as far as the higher direction of the movement is concerned, they are accepted as a matter of course.

The manifest success of this attitude was shown on November 9th, 1923. Four years previously, when I entered the movement, it did not have even a rubber stamp. On November 9th, 1923, the party was dissolved and its property confiscated. The total sum realized by all the objects of value and the paper amounted to more than 170,000 gold marks.

THE PROBLEM OF THE TRADE UNIONS

Owing to the rapid growth of the movement, in 1922 we felt compelled to take a definite stand on a question which has not been fully solved even yet.

In our efforts to discover the quickest and easiest way for the movement to reach the heart of the broad masses we were always confronted with the objection that the worker could never completely belong to us while his interests in the purely vocational and economic sphere were cared for by a political organization conducted by men whose principles were quite different from ours.

That was quite a serious objection. The general belief was that a workman engaged in some trade or other could not exist if he did not belong to a trade union. Not only were his professional interests thus protected but a guarantee of permanent employment was simply inconceivable without membership in a trade union. The majority of the workers were in the trades unions. Generally speaking, the unions had successfully conducted the battle for the establishment of a definite scale of wages and had concluded agreements which guaranteed the worker a steady income. Undoubtedly the workers in the various trades benefited by the results of that campaign and, for honest men especially, conflicts of conscience must have arisen if they took the wages which had been assured through the struggle fought by the trades unions and if