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sent him a written invitation to appear at the debate, Dittmann did not even reply. This is quite in keeping with his character.
The fourth "leader" of the Right Independents—Crispien, is a man of similar type. He also had known better days in his youth, and was then a radical. But when he turned thirty he "grew wiser." He is as respectable and dignified as Dittmann, and he is equally a vacuum as far as ideas are concerned. His manners remind one of our old Socialist Revolutionaries. He tries to preserve the appearance of revolutionary dignity. Whеп necessary he can make a display of a few borrowed revolutionary stock sentences, he can even assume a pathetic air. In some respects he combines in himself all that is worst in the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties.
Crispien's style is illimitable long-winded and trivial. One can hardly imagine greater poverty in ideas. I had the dubious pleasure of meeting Crispien for the first time in Moscow. We often asked ourselves at that time how it could happen that an insignificant man like him could be president and leader of a German labour party, numbering over a million members. Well-informed men answered—and apparently they were right—that Crispien was at one time president of the party precisely because, owing to the general condition of affairs in the party, a president was wanted who possessed neither ideas nor character—a man who could by smooth words "reconcile" all the contradictions which were rife in the party, who could, to use a German expression, "talk away" all the delicate questions which had to be solved. Anybody who has looked through Crispien's pamphlets will be surprised at the dull-wittedness of the author. The German Labour movement has never yet had a more trivial, insipid, ignorant, and wordy "leader."
Crispien pretends to be in favour of proletarian dictatorship. But he understands it in the light of the Erfurt programme. Crispien is in favour of the Soviet system, but he understands it in the light of Kautsky's and Hilferding's theories. Crispien "in principle" agrees with the employment of violence, but he is against terror. Crispien "in principle" is for the proletarian revolution, but he is against civil war and rebellion. Crispien is the quintessence of all the philistine and petty bourgeois elements which are now trying to conceal themselves with the
