classes to his Army Bills, so that by 1913, when he demanded the “great national sacrifice” of a levy of 50 million pounds by a tax, not on income, but on property, there was no difficulty whatever about “managing” the Reichstag.  “The Army Bill of 1913,” says Prince Buelow, “met with such a willing reception from all parties as had never been accorded to any requisition for armaments on land and sea....  So far as man can tell, every necessary and justifiable Army and Navy Bill will always be able to count on a safe Parliamentary majority."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Imperial Germany, p. 169.]

Prince Buelow’s “safe Parliamentary majority” means, of course, a majority sufficient to outvote the Social Democrats, with whom every German Government has to reckon as a permanent opposition.

So far we have left the Social Democrats out of the picture.  It was necessary to do this, in discussing German policy and the relation between the German Government and Reichstag opinion; for the German Government itself habitually leaves them out of the picture.  Hitherto in Germany, so far as opinion on political questions has mattered at all, it is upper-and middle-class opinion that has counted, as it counted in England up to fifty years ago.  To the German Government and to the ordinary educated German the Social Democratic party, though it numbers in its voting ranks over 4 million German workmen and others, does not represent German opinion at all:  it represents something un-German and anti-German—­a public enemy.  Between the Social Democrats and the rest of society a great gulf is fixed, across which no intercourse is possible:  as the pioneers who attempted to introduce the Workers’ Educational Association into Germany found, such intercourse is forbidden from either direction.  The Social Democrats are the “Red Danger,” “men who,” in the Kaiser’s words, are “the enemies of Empire and Fatherland,” and “unworthy” (except, of course, in war-time) “to bear the name of Germans.”  We must go back a hundred years in English history to realise the depth of the animosity between the Social Democratic party and the rest of German society.  “The word Radical,” says an English historian, “conveyed a very different meaning in 1816 to what it does now....  The hands of the Radicals were supposed to be against every man, and every man’s hand was against them.  Scott, when he talks of rebels in arms, always styles them Radicals.  ‘Radicalism is a spirit,’ wrote the Vicar of Harrow in 1820, ’of which the first elements are a rejection of Scripture, and a contempt of all the institutions of your country, and of which the results, unless averted by a merciful Providence, must be anarchy, atheism, and universal ruin.’"[1] The Vicar of Harrow in 1820 very fairly sums up the substance of innumerable German speeches, pamphlets, and election addresses in 1912 on the subject of the Social Democrats.

[Footnote 1:  Spencer Walpole, History of England, vol. i. p. 348.]