quest against the French nation, all the calamities that befell the German people after the so-called wars of liberation[1] would revisit them "with accumulated intensity"? Have we not had twenty years more of Bismarckian rule, and in place of the former persecution of the "demagogues" have we not had the "exceptional law"[2] and the hounding of socialists, with the same police tyranny and the same revolting interpretation of legal texts?
And has it not come literally true, that the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would "drive France into the arms of Russia," and that after this annexation Germany would either become the acknowledged vassal of Russia, or would have, after a short respite, to arm herself for a new war? And what a war? A "race war of the Germans against the coalesced Slavs and Latins"! Is it not a fact, that the annexation of the French provinces has driven France into the arms of Russia? Has not Bismarck for twenty years courted in vain the favor of the Czar, and lowered himself before him with even meaner servility than little Prussia, before she became the "first great power of Europe," had been accustomed to display at the feet of "Holy Russia"? And does not the "Damocles sword" overhang us of a war, on the first day of which all written treaties will be blown unto the wind like chaff; of a war as to which nothing is certain but the absolute uncertainty of its issue; of a race war which will expose all Europe to the devastation of fifteen or twenty millions of armed men, and which only hangs fire
- ↑ 1813–15, against Napoleon.—Note to the American Edition.
- ↑ This law was passed by the German Reichstag in 1878 with the object of suppressing socialist agitation, confiscating the socialist press and literature, etc. Owing to the courage and determination of the socalists, this "law of exception" proved a boomerang, and after twelve years of fierce conflict between the socialist workingmen and the capitalist government, the latter allowed the law to die by limitation.—Note to the American Edition.
