The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

the threat to public safety posed by the long hours worked by railway engine drivers – in the 1860s a driver threatened with dismissal for failing to stop at three stations revealed he had been driving for thirty-eight consecutive hours and had fallen asleep in the cab

By the eve of the First World War more than 15 million Germans were covered by sickness insurance, 28 million were insured against accidents, and a million were receiving pensions. None of these measures stopped people from voting for the socialists, but they may well have played a part in preventing the working classes from supporting the socialist left wing.

In Britain the modern welfare state was established by the Liberal governments of the immediate pre-war years, driven partly by a genuine social conscience and partly by a wish, similar to that of Bismarck, to prevent the working classes from drifting away to socialism.

The declared aim of the socialist movement was to overthrow the central institutions of ‘bourgeois’ society, including private property, business corporations, the police, the army, the Church, and even the family. They were to be replaced by a state in which property would be owned collectively, children brought up communally, religion abolished, and businesses run by the workers. In practice, however, the politics of socialism turned out to be more complex, and less frightening, than these terrifying visions suggested.

Terrifying? Not sure if Evans is being ironic here.

In 1875 the two groups united at a conference held in Gotha, forming the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. But in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx suggested that the ideas of the new party owed more to Lassalle than to himself.

Two groups = Lassalle's, and Liebknecht's/Bebel's SPD.

Kautsky (1854–1938), a professional journalist, had emerged as the SPD’s chief ideologue. Since it was a scientifically proven fact that the course of social evolution would bring the working class to power, all it had to do in Kautsky’s view was to remain in existence and the revolution would come of its own accord. Thus from 1890 onwards the SPD tried to avoid the danger of being banned again, and laid ever greater stress on its peaceful and law-abiding character.

Luxemburg argued that war could and should be stopped by a mass strike of proletarians in all potentially participating countries. She successfully introduced a motion into the Second International’s Congress at Stuttgart in 1907 calling for a European general strike if war threatened.

these beliefs made her a more democratic figure than, say, Lenin,

the Second International’s policy of preventing war by staging a general European strike. This was ultimately to prove futile.

Not true: it failed because they abandoned the policy, not because it could not succeed.

a movement after the turn of the century to stop reservists being called up for a military campaign against the secession of Norway. Branting called a general strike under the slogan ‘Hands off Norway, King!’ Alarmed at the prospect of being unable to recruit an effective military force to mobilize against the Norwegians, the Swedish government caved in, and the two countries divorced peacefully.

The SPD leadership’s commitment to enfranchising women was never more than token, as became clear in 1910, when the prospect of extending the vote to all adult males in Prussia became a possibility and was embraced by the party without any reference to votes for women.

These beliefs were inculcated, especially in Germany and Austria, through a vast and elaborate network of exclusively socialist institutions, newspapers, magazines, clubs and associations, trade unions, educational societies and much more, so that members could live their entire lives in a world informed by socialist values.

In France and Germany, as well as in Britain in 1867, voting rights were extended by conservative politicians to groups of the population they wrongly thought would outflank the liberals by voting to preserve the existing order.

Moderate liberals believed that only those who had a stake in the country, whether through owning property and paying taxes, or those who were able to contribute to its political culture, for example by being able to read and write, should have the right to vote. But gradually they were forced to extend this right through the pressure for change exerted by the growing power of socialist and democratic movements.

Landlords were attacked, and a few were shot (one commentator claimed that ‘the English shot pheasants and poachers, and the Irish shot landlords and agents’).

The pre-eminent practitioner of fiscal conservatism, working for the restriction of government spending, Gladstone regarded all his policies as designed to preserve social and political order. He believed strongly in rule by the elite, packed his Ministries with Whig peers,

~liberals~

Disraeli, who employed humour and sarcasm in an attempt to deflate ‘that unprincipled maniac Gladstone’ as he called him in private, a man who in his view possessed an ‘extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition’. Gladstone for his part regarded Disraeli as an unprincipled opportunist: ‘The Tory party,’ he remarked, ‘had principles by which it would and did stand for bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed.’

His great series of outdoor speeches in 1879–80, known as the ‘Midlothian campaign’, in which he brought many thousands to a state of frenzy with his rhetorical attacks on Disraeli’s government, marked the creation of the modern electoral campaign, in which he addressed his programme not to his constituency but to the country.

The introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 freed Irish electors from the pressure previously put on them by Anglo-Irish landlords and brought fifty-nine Irish MPs to the Westminster Parliament, all of them committed to Home Rule for Ireland.

Surprise!

The 1884 Reform Act increased the number of Irish Home Rulers in Parliament to eighty-six in the election of the following year.

the Conservatives under Salisbury were continuously in power for some two decades, from 1885 to 1905. The Irish question had brought Liberal hegemony to an end.

Salisbury’s years in office were quiet ones, reflecting his deeply conservative belief that ‘whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible’.

the removal of the Lords’ power of veto over legislation. Asquith introduced a Parliament Bill to achieve this aim. By threatening immediate resignation, the Prime Minister forced the new king, George V, to agree to create 500 Liberal peers should the Lords reject the Bill, which they did. Asquith called a second general election, which took place in December 1910 with the same result as before. Under the threat of the 500 new peers, and against the resistance of almost a hundred ‘last ditchers’ among the hereditary peers, the Bill passed the House of Lords by seventeen votes and received the royal assent.

the Canadian-born businessman and tariff reformer Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923), was a strong opponent of Home Rule

Surely rather ironic for a Canadian.

Ulster Protestants, who objected vehemently to being ruled by the Catholic majority in the rest of Ireland.

Rule by the majority? Whatever next.

The Gladstonian alliance of the middle and working classes was coming to an end as the suburban bourgeoisie began drifting away to the Conservatives in step with the decline of the landed interest’s domination of the party.