Vice-Bismarck—von Stolberg spoke for 4 minutes, 7 seconds. 


FROM THE STENOGRAPHIC REPORT 


Reichstag. 4th sitting. Monday, September 16, 1878. Speaker: Forckenbeck. 

//House met 11.30. Adjourned 3.40.//4 

Deputising for the Imperial Chancellor, Minister of State, Count Stolberg-Wernigerode: 

“What will matter is ... ensuring that in future no one can engage in such 
agitation with the slightest semblance of legality.” 


FROM THE SPEECHES AT THE SITTING OF SEPTEMBER 16 
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT 


Bebel: “Gentlemen, at the beginning of today’s debate attention was specifically 
drawn by the Imperial Chancellor’s deputy to the attempted assassinations,28” as was 
similarly done a few days since in the King’s Speech?88 and likewise in the preamble 
to the Bill submitted to us; everyone who has spoken today has likewise more or 
less touched on the assassination attempts, and everyone has designated those 
assassination attempts as the immediate occasion for this exceptional law,?89 nor 
could anything be more evident than that they were the cause thereof.—In that 
case, Gentlemen, the government might justly have been expected to express itself 
clearly and accurately in this respect, to give evidence as to what discoveries it had 
made, what facts incriminating us had been brought to light that might prove the 
existence of just one, if only an ideological, connection between the would-be 
assassins> and Social-Democracy. To this day, however, nothing of the kind has 
been done, all we have been given has been empty words and accusations. Similarly, we 
hear the parrot-cry: ‘The assassination attempts were instigated by the Social- 
Democrats.’ This is to accuse the Social-Democrats of ‘being the party of regicides’, 
etc.... We are quite unwilling to put up with the silence that has been maintained 
until this very day.... First and foremost, we are vitally concerned to know what is 
contained in the numerous records made in writing in connection with the assassination 
attempts. In particular, we insist on knowing what came to light during the 
extraordinarily numerous interrogations that took place in various parts of Germany of 


a Square brackets encountered in Marx’s actual manuscript have been replaced 
with two oblique lines.— Ed. 
b Emil Heinrich Max Hédel and Dr. Karl Eduard Nobiling.— Ed. 


Parliamentary Debate on the Anti-Socialist Law 241 


members of our party and non-party members, of men of the most diverse political leanings 
who had any connection, however remote, with the would-be assassins. We, upon whom the 
guilt and the responsibility is being foisted, insist that the matter be finally clarified. 
And this in particular as regards the last assassination attempt which was the immediate 
occasion of the fresh elections to the Reichstag and the submission of this Bill... 

“I went away //from the Vorwärts where he had been making inquiries about 
Dr. Nobiling—this, late at night on the 2nd of June (1878)// very satisfied with what 
I had heard and, a few minutes later, came to a shop where, to my intense 
surprise, I found a despatch posted up which read: 

‘Berlin, 2 o'clock in the morning. In the course of a later judicial examination, 
the would-be assassin, Nobiling, confessed that he subscribed to socialist tendencies, 
also that he had repeatedly attended socialist meetings here and that he had, for a 
week or more, already been intending to shoot His Imperial Majesty? because he 
regarded the removal of the Head of State to be in the interests of the public weal.’ 

‘...The despatch that precipitated this piece of news into the world is explicitly 
designated an official one. Here, in my hand, I have the despatch which was 
officially delivered to the editorial board of the Kreuz-Zettung>2% with comments 
written by the Kreuz-Zeitung’s editor.© There is not a shadow of doubt as to the