The remarkable organisation of the German Socialist party calls here for some notice. Socialism owes its origin in Germany to the Workman's Party founded by Ferdinand Lasalle in 1862. Lasalle was one of those semitic geniuses of huge learning and untiring 204 energy who occasionally spring up to astonish the world. He started the party on a basis of State Socialism involving the resumption by the people of their rights in the land, and there was generally a strong infusion of nationalism in his scheme. Although in the beginning his party excited great enthusiasm, at his death in 1864 it only numbered about five thousand avowed adherents. Four years afterwards the body came under the influence of the International and of Marx, owing to the zeal of Bebel and Liebnecht. Up to the Congress of Eisenach in 1869 the Lasalle party and that of Marx were at daggers drawn. At Gotha in 1875 by a fusion of the two parties the present Social Democratic Party was founded. Since then that party has steadily grown, till it now numbers more than a million and a half of adherents. Owing to this rapid progress and its practical organisation the German party must be said to have taken the lead in Socialism since the time of the Commune.
In Russia the Socialist movement was, on the face of it, mixed up with nationalist and political agitation, which was 205 natural in a country in the bonds of the crudest form of absolutism. Nevertheless the ultimate aim of the party is unmistakable, and the propaganda has been carried on with a revolutionary fervour and purity of devotion which have never been surpassed, if they have ever been equalled. The slaying of the Czar on 13th March 1881, with the tragic scenes that followed it, has been the most dramatic event that the Russian movement has given to the world. The courage and devotion that went to the accomplishment of this lightning stroke, and the fact that it was directed against the acknowledged representative of reactionary oppression, has had great effect on progressively-minded persons by the mere force of sympathy, and has directed men’s thoughts very much to the struggles of the Russians against the tyranny which throttles them.