586 THE CLASS STRUGGLE NEW GERMANY 587 deposits and of their readiness to meet all obligations incurred by the monarchy in the shape of war loans. They believe that the time is ripe for a social revolution in Germany, but desire that it be introduced gradually, without skipping what they believe to be the necessary steps in evolution.
has made him at least to the uninformed outsider, the expression of the separatist, particularist movement. He belongs to that wing of the Independents which insistently demands that all remnants of the old regime must be thrown into the discard, and with commendable directness he applies this not only to the Erzbergers and the Solfs but also to the Suedekums and the Davids who have been just as thoroughly discredited by their imperialist activities. He demands that a government of Socialists be established for Germany that is free from the domination of any one state. As this demand is naturally directed against the leading personages in Prussia he has been supported by the particularist element in his own state who fail to understand the real motives that prompt his demands.
One of the interesting figures of this group is Kurt Eisner, the leader of the Independent Social Democrats of Bavaria. The extraordinary conditions that confront Bavaria and South Germany as a whole have made this strong and energetic personality the storm center in the revived fight between the North and the South. As is well known, Germany became a federation of States in 1870. The South Bavaria, Wuerttemberg, Hessen, Baden and a number of other smaller states had more democratic forms in its social and political life than Prussia. The caste system had not become as marked there because the class interests had not been able to divide the people of the South as they had the more industrially developed North. Soon after the federalization of Germany, therefore, a strongly particularist movement grew up in the South, against everything that was Prussian. The Prussian was more hated in the South, and especially in Bavaria, up to the late 90 than any foreigner. Then it died out to reappear again in the latter part of the war. During the first years of the war, the South was as belligerent and just as imperialistic as the North. In fact, the King of Bavaria sent a special envoy to the Peace Conference at Brest Litovsk because it was feared that Prussia would deal too leniently with free Russia. For this he was loudly acclaimed by the Bavarian capitalist press. But the misery and starvation of the last twenty months has made the Bavarians forget their own part in the war, and Prussia became the butt of their fury.
Reports that have come from Germany in the last weeks have been so clouded, and show such incredible ignorance of persons and conditions, that we here must judge rather by what we know of the most recent past of Eisner from German socialist papers than from the badly garbled reports that appear in the capitalist press by correspondents who attribute to him statements and opinions expressed by his supporters among the particularists.
Thus, for instance, we take the following from a campaign speech made on October 23, after his release from prison where he had been held for ten months on account of his activity in favor of a political mass strike against the war: When Kurt Eisner, in October of this year, became the candidate of the Independent Social Democrats in the by election made necessary by the severe illness of the majority Social Democrat, von Vollmar, he strongly fought this tendency, which had found some degree of support in the official Social Democratic movement and its candidate, Auer. But the queer logic of events When took up the fight against the pan Germans at the beginning of the war, was ridiculed. Scheidemann and Auer took up the fight against the pan Germans only when they became their competitors for political office. To day, under the new (Maximilian) government we are still living in a sea of lies. To call upon the people to day to defend their fatherland, as has been done in the last appeal issued by the National Executive Committee of the Social Democratic Party, is to mislead them. We are facing to day not the destruction of Germany, but the destruction of those who bear the responsibility for the When the majority Socialists demand to day the abolition of the monarchy they are only putting up a big front to cover war.