I had hardly finished writing my book, "Leur Patrie," before some of the comrades of the German Social- Democracy asked to be allowed to translate it into German, which has now been done.
And, as a big book was not within everybody's means, they asked me to summarize in a pamphlet, which they would translate, the substance of our anti-patriotic ideas, and they assured me that they would willingly undertake to spread the pamphlet all over Germany, in the face of the judges, police, and soldiers of the Kaiser.
But you have had quite recently, gentlemen, a striking instance of the international character of our socialist movement; almost simultaneously in the French parliament and in the German parliament the same words rang out.
Ah! the parliamentary socialists, in France as well as in Germany, have no love for those members of their party who, especially at election time, scare the voters with brutal plain-speaking, instead of cajoling them with high-sounding but ambiguous phrases intended to reconcile opposing interests.
But when an idea has made its way in the revolutionary ranks, then even those in the parliamentary circles begin to stir.
In former times the parliamentary socialists of France and Germany were outspoken anti-militarists and internationalists. You all know that Bebel in Germany had to spend eighteen months in a fortress prison for having protested against the brutal annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. The German parliamentary socialists, more thorough going than ours, have even refused on every occasion to vote for the war supplies in parliament; but, in Germany just as in France, the parliamentary socialists have always been careful not to shock the patriotic prejudices of the voters. Yet, quite recently in the French Chamber and in the German Reichstag an entirely new tone was heard.
