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cloak of Socialism. He is loquacious, affable and tame as long as he deals with indifferent topics, when he has to feed the audience with a liberal ration of "revolutionary" phrases. But when it is a question of a serious struggle, Crispien becomes simultaneously coarse and cowardly. At the Halle Congress we did not see the sanctimonious Crispien; there we saw another Crispien, who tried to retain power by every available means, who knew of no baseness which he was not prepared to commit in order to remain in power. He belongs to that type of men of whom we can say beforehand: he has stepped upon the inclined plane and will slip down to the very bottom. Some workers, members of the party congress, told me with good reason that there is only one difference between Crispien and Scheidemann, and that is that Scheidemann is fair while Crispien is a shade darker.
George Ledebour is quite unique. He has now become leader and president of the "Right" Independent party, though up till now he was not taken seriously by Rights, who regarded him as a popular fool. The Right Independents have now purposely placed him in the forefront, being well aware of the extraordinary ambition of this old man. They managed to make him the first to sign the resolution of the Rights. The outer world could thus imagine that he was playing a leading part.
We must confess that before the Halle Congress we did not fully share the estimate which the German Communists and the Left Independents formed of Ledebour. We knew of course that Ledebour was the personification of the old bourgeois democratic views on Socialism, that to the end of his days he would remain a typical democrat of the 1848 period. We had read his reactionary middle-class statements about terror. We knew he was not a Marxist and could never become one. But still, we valued him as an old fighter, a brave man taking part in the Labour movement, not out of any selfish motives, but in order to serve the working class. Thus when the German Communists and the Left Independents told us that Ledebour was now playing a counter-revolutionary role in Germany, we were inclined to regard it as an exaggeration. Alas, all that we saw and heard in Germany convinced us that we were in
