EVOLUTION OF SOCIALIST PROGRAMME IN GERMANY 703; to supervise the committee. If differences should arise between these two bodies, eighteen delegates specially elected from different localities arbitrate. Tl?e highest court of appeal in all questions is the annual congress. This is composed of delegates chosen from members in every locality; any one delegate however may not represent more than 400 votes. Voting on questions of organization and principle, as well as at elections of party-tri- bunals, is by simple majority of the number of party-comrades represented, but in all other questions by the number of delegates. Taken altogether, then, the Gotha programme breathes the spirit of the Marxist theory; and the sole supremacy of the Marxist principles in the aggregate Radical Labour-movement in Germany dates from the debates and resolutions of those May days in the year 1875. 4.--PROGRAMI?E AND ORGANIZATION OF THE PARTY UNDER THE LAW OF EXCEPTION (1878 1890.) SOCIALIST LABOUR- (.?kUSNAHMEGESETZ). After the two Socialist sections were united, the following of Social Democracy grew like an avalanche. This was proved forthwith by the Reichstag elections on the 10th January, 1877, when the ' Socialist Labour Party,' as they were now formally styled, recorded 493,000 votes, ?.e. 9 per cent. of the aggregate voting, for their candidates. Shortly after this followed the two attempts on the life of the German emperor. The perpetrators were, in the former instance, one of the little band of German anarchists, in the latter, merely a ruined desperate character craving for pseudo-heroic notoriety. These attempts called forth a tumult of excitement and indig- nation against Social Democracy, held by public opinion as responsible for them, and under cover of this sentiment the co- ercive ,legislation entitled the Exception Act (Ausnahme?lesetz) against the ' efforts' of that party 'dangerous to the common- wealth'was enacted (October, 1878). The discretionary power conferred by it upon the Govern- ment was wielded at first with inconsiderate severity. Hun- dreds of newspapers, pamphlets, political and industrial unions, were swept away at one blow as by a hurricane; all meetings at which Social Democrats were to speak were forbidden. Every kind of organized combination was suppressed and ten-
