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wrote: 'A long conversation with Papa over my joining the army. I think: This war has been given to our generation and to us individually as a fiery test, to mature us and make us men for the tremendous years and events that are at the door.' He concludes with something very like a prayer:

May I return after honorably sustaining my test in war and victory, to find my parents rejoicing in realized hopes and laboring on new tasks; may I find myself strong and prepared for the duties which the world shall set me; may I find my country at once prouder and more modest, stronger and braver; and may I be able to scan the formless chaos of the future, and detect the first forms arising from its bosom, so that I may do my part in giving them shape and substance; these things, O Rulers of the Universe, I pray and hope and demand of

you.

Let me quote a few entries from the period of the war. On January 17, 1915, he writes:

This monstrous thing which I am actually living the war seems to me like a powerful spontaneous urge toward that which is classic, purely designed, and severe. War which seemed to our ancestors the fullness of romantic passion, the prototype of romanticism, becomes in our day a sublime. destiny, an unqualified necessity, that we must submit to in order that our excitable and mobile era may become hardened and tempered, serious and resolute, mature and made ready for the new and magnificent deeds of the future, and their virile beauty.

On July 17, 1915, he wrote in a letter to his parents:

I must tell you one thing more. My youth was happy and filled with experience such as few have enjoyed. I owe that to you. But without this later army experience, in many ways evil and harsh as it is, my youth might have been wasted. It was too pure, too good, too morbid, too sheltered from the brute facts of life, from contact with the rank and file of men. Now I seem to have reestablished equilibrium.

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It seems to me that we cannot do what so many say, and take a definite attitude toward an event like the war. It is too immeasurable and overwhelming. . . . It seems to me utter arrogance to adopt an opinion in face of the God of War. All that you can do in its presence is to pray, pity, love, hate, surrender life, or commence a new life.'

On March 29, 1916, he wrote:

My opinion before the war, which you know had been fully formed, has been but strengthened in this respect. My love for form and beauty, for that which thrives and grows by an organic impulse, for that powerful passion for beauty which is crystallized in classic bronze and marble, has but increased. And my horror for what is accidental, artificial, arbitrary, purely negative, for that illusion purely a matter of wordswhich takes the periphery of life for its centre has meanwhile grown stronger.

On August 17, 1917, he wrote with reference to having received honorable mention:

I always feel a certain diffidence in such matters. I do not live for the outer things of life, but I certainly shall live for the world and shall not retire into myself. However, I wish to cherish within myself a soul intact, a God whom only a few shall know, but who, when I do withdraw for a time into the privacy of my heart, shall be but the more glorious for that reason. While we live, we have many enemies and are constantly assailed, and after death we can become a symbol and a monument to men, and leave an influence which lives after us.

On December 24 he again writes:

One thing has become clear to me. The highest thing a man can attain in this life is not glory, or happiness, or grandeur. No, neither is it that which seemed hitherto the highest thing in life-labor. It is only this: to become a model, so that your mere existence may influence the world and humanity. Cæsar, Christ, Socrates, Alexander, were all these things. In this war, I have constantly seen what they call leaders, and observed what leaders can be and do. What

is their art? Do they sway men by moral maxims, and teaching, and isolated deeds? No, but by what is usualy called good example, which simply means by being what they are.

It is interesting to note Braun's observations on political questions, which he had studied carefully with a view to entering public life. In 1911, he sketched Germany's situation in case of a world war, where Italy withdrew from the Triple Alliance, and England was ranged with his country's enemies. He commented:

Our over-shrewd moves on the political chessboard have resulted in an alliance of France, England, and Russia, and we need a lantern of Diogenes to find a country that will stand by us honestly. Can we expect that of Austria or Turkey, where cabinets friendly in turn to England and to Germany alternate in unvarying succession? These are the results of a policy of selling ourselves to the highest bidder, which seems to have become good tradition.

He makes the following comment upon the outcome of a war solely for the defense of the fatherland:

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Cloudy as is the future, I am certain of this: Germany will not perish. I do not base my confidence, as many boasters do, on the idea that we are perfect and have accomplished mighty things; but rather because we have not yet worked out our destiny, because the Germany which we carry in our hearts has not yet attained its final form and figure. Perhaps we have expressed ourselves fully in music, but we have not yet fulfilled our mission in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the other higher fields of life. Our problem is a hard one, harder than that of other nations, because we are more diverse among ourselves and present more internal contrasts.

This is why he attached such great importance to Socialism. But he was not a Socialist in the current sense of dreaming of a life of equality and peace. 'All men to become equal by virtue of equality of opportunity and training!

Horrible thought! Zeus save me from such a world! No, because men are not equal. It is for that very reason that I would welcome absolute equality of opportunity.' But like all seriousminded persons, he was a champion of the doctrine of power in politics. 'I firmly believe that it is unqualifiedly necessary in the general interest of the human race, for each nation to pursue an egoistic policy, and that even the Socialists will be compelled to adopt such a course if they attain power.' He expresses the same opinion in referring to Italy, which he had visited as a young boy to study its art, and again as a soldier, when he served there with the army of invasion in 1917. Shortly before his death, in 1918, he read Hartmann's little book upon the Italian Renaissance.

This is a very interesting book. It teaches many things above all, the first lesson of history, that organization always wins. An organized people inevitably realizes that no theoretical political edifice, regardless of how much genius may be bestowed upon it, ever survives. So Italy was not founded on the high ideals of Mazzini, but on the old Piedmont state, with all its imperfections and inadequacies. To be sure, nothing can exist without an ideal behind it, and without great men to make that ideal a force and to give it practical content. But our political institutions are inevitably based upon fact and precedent - upon what has existed before, albeit imperfect. We must reconcile

ourselves to this.

However, Braun does not mean force and power in the brute physical sense.

It seems to me that the history of the Italian Renaissance should caution us against exaggerating the material factors in history. Hartmann expresses surprise that the cause of Italian liberty could gain such momentum in spite of the poverty and political apathy of the working people of Italy, and in particular of Piedmont. That movement was largely a movement of the upper classes, of the nobility and the intellectuals.

During the war, he studied with interest the change produced by army experience in the rank and file of the nation. He wrote in September 1915: — The drift of the soldiers toward Socialism is essentially negative. It expresses their wrathful contempt for flabby bourgeois society, for those who have remained at home. It suggests no creative force, from which we may hope for a new society. It points toward this only through the new consciousness of power and mastery which is stirring among the commons. Every individual has developed remarkable independence and self-reliance. I am not passing judgment. I am merely recording my observations. When the army returns home, the civic consciousness of the people will be enormously strengthened. Here we have a superabundance of vigor, a tremendous feeling of power. It will take great intelligence and skill to direct the tremendous forces thus generated among the common people into productive channels.

In March 1918, he reflected:

'When the army ebbs back home at the end of the war, it will inundate the country with a flood of energy, for both evil and good. Many men will be worse, will become criminals. Many finer natures will be coarsened. The defenders of customs, culture, and order must stand firm. Women, government officials, judges, clergymen, party leaders, trade-union bosses, must exert themselves

to the utmost to guide this torrent of undisciplined and savage force into its natural channels, to refine the moral conscience of the nation, to cultivate the spirit of order.'

He aspired to be a participant in this labor.

'I desire more strongly and ardently than ever to be of service. I shall devote myself to my studies for some years after the war, and thus prepare myself for public life.'

However all these hopes and plans came to naught on April 29, 1918, when he was killed at the front by a fragment of an enemy shell. He left behind him in these pages an image of himself which may become, as he desired, a model and example for those who survive him. His portrait shows him to have been a stalwart, noble-featured fellow. One of his companions relates that, when he was leading a party of soldiers to gather up the corpses on the battlefield at night, the latter balked at their task. Urging them on with exhortations and admonitions, he began to sing in the darkness verses of the Iliad and the hymns of Hölderlein. A lieutenant in the party, ordinarily skeptical and sarcastic, remarked in all seriousness: 'But few of the dead are honored with such funeral chants.'

REVOLUTIONARY THEORY IN EUROPE

BY T. G. MASARYK

[President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia is himself a Social Democrat and possesses an intimate knowledge of revolutionary currents in Europe. He, therefore, speaks with peculiar authority upon the subject of the following article.]

From La Revue de Genève, March

(SWISS INDEPENDENT LITERARY AND POLITICAL MONTHLY)

BOLSHEVIKI want revolution at any cost; Western Socialists, and above all Social Democrats, oppose Russia's revolutionary methods. Consequently the Bolsheviki attack the latter with violence, call them obstacles to reform, and condemn their 'perverse blindness' to the necessity and the justice of violent revolution. Lenin and his party are particularly hostile to Kautsky. Not only Kautsky and Bernstein, but nearly all other Socialist leaders throughout the world have been excommunicated by the Bolsheviki. The men thus read out of the revolutionary party included such Russians as Plekhanoff and Martoff; Germans and Austrians like Otto Bauer, Frederic Adler, Hilferding, Ledebour and Scheidemann, such leading Frenchmen as Longuet, the whole English Labor Party, Turati and his followers in Italy, and Hillquit and his associates in America. Indeed, the 'purification' is as wide as the world itself. Lenin condemns such men as opportunists and 'social patriots' who have falsified the doctrines of Marx and have distorted his revolutionary programme until it means merely bourgeois reform. He accuses them of exhibiting personal cowardice at a time when their comrades were fighting Tsarism at the risk of their lives or languishing in Siberian prisons.

It is true that Marx and Engels believed for a time that there would be a great final revolution and that the overthrow of capitalism was imminent. In their Communist Manifesto they asserted that Germany was on the eve of a bourgeois revolution, to be followed at once by a proletarian revolution. Later they recognized that these ideas were mistaken, and they kept postponing their violent revolution until finally they practically abandoned the idea. Both Marx and Engels thus got farther and farther away from the old revolutionary theory. Finally Engels, in a farewell message to the German proletariat in 1895, advised its members to obey the spirit of Marx, to renounce the employment of force, and to devote themselves entirely to gaining their ends by the ballot. As soon as they had a popular majority and a majority in Parliament, they might set up a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Prior to 1848, and for a short period thereafter, Engels was an extreme radical, anxious to start a revolt against Prussian, Austrian, and Russian absolutism. But his ideal even then was political liberty under a republican form of government. He discussed revolution rather vaguely without attempting to analyze scientifically what it meant. We have for example his

letter to Marx in 1851, in which he refers to revolutions as natural phenomena that follow physical laws. He used such expressions as 'the physical force of necessity' - which showed careless sociological analysis. Later, Engels and Marx thought out the subject more thoroughly, as we learn from the many articles and pamphlets which they subsequently wrote upon the subject. The Paris Commune aroused interest in the comparative study of revolutions. A Social Democratic Party was organized. Marx and Engels became absorbed in scientific Socialism. They were busy developing the distinction between Socialism and various forms of anarchy and, in this connection, they accepted the theory of Darwinian evolution.

Engels wrote very plainly, in a letter addressed to Bernstein in 1883, that the Socialists ought to wait for a bourgeois republic. This was an unqualified endorsement of the evolutionary theory. In the preface to his fifth edition of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1890, he wrote as follows: 'Marx counted entirely upon the intellectual evolution of the working-classes for the final victory of the ideas contained in this Manifestoan intellectual evolution sure to come about through a combination of action and discussion.' In his commentary upon the Erfurt Platform, adopted in 1891, he declared that in countries like England, the United States, and France, where the people have a vote and control their legislatures, the transition from the old order to the new may occur without domestic conflict. He thought it would be easy to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in a democratic republic. In this view he was but following the path of Marx who had taught the same thing in the introduction to his Class Struggle in France between 1848 and 1850.

So we see that Marx started out in 1848, and during the reaction which followed, by being a romantic revolutionist, but that when he had developed his theory of scientific socialism he reversed this attitude. Therefore, the Bolsheviki are not honest in always quoting the Marx of the earlier epoch. During the period of his greatest political lucidity, Marx considered that the social revolution might occur without violence, at least in such countries as England, the United States, and Holland. He said this explicitly in his Amsterdam address of 1872, shortly after the failure of the Paris Commune. His words were as follows:

The workers will have to seize political power some day in order to reorganize the industrial system. They will have to overthrow the old political machinery which maintains the old economic institutions, unless they propose to renounce the kingdom of this world as did the early Christians and to neglect and despise it. But we have never insisted that identical methods ought to be used everywhere to attain this end. We know that we must take into consideration the institutions, the customs, and the traditions of different countries. We do not deny that in certain lands, like the United States and England, - and if I knew your institutions better I might perhaps add Holland, the workingmen can attain their purposes by peaceful means.

However, this is not the case in every coun

try.

As for Engels, we have already said that he declared a revolution unnecessary even in Germany.

Consequently, the Bolsheviki are wrong in appealing to Marx and Engels; because those writers abandoned the idea of a revolution as soon as their socialist theories became clarified and scientific. It makes one indignant to note how the Bolsheviki evade quoting the authority of Marx and Engels on this point; and this proves that they are incapable of serious political thought.

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