Might I too be permitted to bid farewell to the reader. 

The Sozialdemokrat must vanish from the scene. Not only 
because this has been so often announced to the other parties. Far 
more because the Sozialdemokrat would itself under the changed 
circumstances necessarily become something else, with a different 
mission, different contributors, a different readership. And a 
paper which played such a specific historical role, a paper which 
was peculiar for the fact that in its columns, and in its columns 
only, the twelve most decisive years in the life of the German 
workers’ party are reflected—such a paper cannot and must not 
change. It must remain what it was, or it must cease to exist. On 
this we all agree. 

We also all agree that the paper cannot disappear without 
leaving a gap. No organ appearing in Germany, official or not, 
can replace it. For the party this is only a relative drawback: it is 
entering into different conditions of struggle and therefore needs 
different weapons and a different strategy and tactics. But it is an 
absolute loss for the contributors, and particularly for me. 

Twice in my life I have had the honour and the pleasure of 
working for a periodical where I enjoyed to full measure the two 
most favourable conditions in which one can be effective in the 
press: firstly, unconditional press freedom, and secondly, the 
certainty that one was reaching exactly that public one wished to 
reach. 

The first occasion was in 1848-1849 at the Neue Rheinische 
Zeitung.'’” Those were revolutionary times, and in such times it is 
anyway a pleasure to work for the daily press. You see the effect 
of every word before your eyes, you see how the articles literally 
hit the target, as though they were shells, and how they explode. 

The second occasion was at the Sozialdemokrat. This too was a 
revolutionary interval, after the party found its feet again at the 
Wyden Congress, and from then on resumed the fight “with all 
methods”, legal or not.’'? The Sozialdemokrat was the embodiment 
of this illegality. For it there was no binding imperial constitution, 
no imperial criminal code, no Prussian common law. Illegally, 
defying and disdaining all imperial and provincial legislation, it 
penetrated every week the frontiers of the Holy German Empire; 
detectives, spies, agents provocateurs, customs officials, doubled 
and trebled frontier forces were powerless: almost with the 
certainty of a bill of exchange it was presented to the subscriber 
on the date of maturity; no Stephan could prevent the German 
Reichspost from having to dispatch and deliver it. And this with 
over ten thousand subscribers in Germany; the banned writings of 
the period before 1848 were very rarely paid for by their 
bourgeois purchasers, but for twelve years the workers paid with 
the greatest punctuality for their Sozialdemokrat. How often did my 
heart, the heart of an old revolutionary, rejoice to observe this 
excellently lubricated noiseless interplay between editors, dis- 
tributors and subscribers, this businesslike organised revolutionary 
work proceeding week after week, year in, year out with the same 
certainty! 

And the paper was worth the troubles and dangers which its 
distribution cost. It was certainly the best paper the party ever 
possessed. And this was not simply because it, alone amongst 
them, enjoyed full freedom of the press. The principles of the 
party were expounded and recorded with unusual clarity and 
firmness, and the tactical line of the editors was almost always the 
correct one. And then there was something else. While our 
bourgeois press cultivated the most deathly boredom, the Sozial- 
demokrat generously reflected the cheerful humour with which our 
workers are wont to fight police harassment. 

And the Sozialdemokrat was anything but a mere mouthpiece for 
the parliamentary group. When in 1885 the majority of the group 
favoured the Steamer Subsidy, the paper firmly supported the 
opposite opinion and held on to its right to do so, even when the 
majority forbade it this right in an order of the day which they 
themselves must today find incomprehensible. The fight lasted for 
just four weeks, during which the editors were warmly supported 
by the party comrades inside and outside Germany. On April 2 
the ban was issued; on the 23rd the Soztaldemokrat published a 
declaration agreed between the parliamentary group and the 
editors, indicating that the group had rescinded its ban.'’ 

At a later date it fell to the Sozialdemokrat to put to the test the 
renowned Swiss right of asylum.’*? There it became clear, as in all 
similar cases since 1830, that this right of asylum always collapses 
precisely when it really ought to come into force. But this is 
nothing new. Since the little republic’s democratisation from 1830 
on,'”' the neighbouring great powers have allowed it the democra- 
tic experiment domestically only on the condition that the right of 
asylum for refugees is exercised under the supervision of the 
interested great power. Switzerland is too weak not to submit. It 
cannot be blamed for this. Marx used to say, specifically with 
reference to Holland, Switzerland and Denmark, that today the 
worst situated was a small country which had had a great history. 
But in “free Switzerland” they should stop bragging about their 
immaculate right of asylum. 

The Soztaldemokrat was the banner of the German party; after 
twelve years of struggle the party is victorious. The Anti-Socialist 
Law has fallen, Bismarck has been overthrown. The powerful 
German Empire set in motion against us all its instruments of 
power; the party scoffed at them, until finally the German Empire 
had to lower its flag before ours. The Imperial Government will 
try out common law against us for the while, and so we shall, for 
the while, try out those legal means which we have regained for 
ourselves by the vigorous use of illegal means. Whether the 
“legal” means are once again written into our programme or not 
is pretty immaterial. The attempt must be made to get along with 
legal methods of struggle for the time being. Not only we are 
doing this, it is being done by all workers’ parties in all countries 
where the workers have a certain measure of legal freedom of 
action, and this for the simple reason that it is the most productive 
method for them. However, the prerequisite for this is that the 
other side also acts legally. If the attempt is made once again 
actually to place our party outside the common law, be it by means 
of new emergency legislation, unlawful convictions and practices 
by the Imperial Supreme Court, by police tyranny, or by other 
illegal encroachments by the executive, then the German Social 
Democrats will once again be driven to the illegal path as the only 
one open to them. Even for the English, the most law-abiding 
nation, the first condition of legality on the part of the people is 
that all other agents of power remain within the bounds of the 
law; should this not be the case, then in the English view of law, 
rebellion is the first civic duty. 

If this should happen, what then? Will the party build 
barricades, appeal to the power of the gun? It will certainly not do 

its opponents this favour. It will be saved from this by the 
knowledge of its own position of strength, given it by every 
general election to the Reichstag. Twenty per cent of the votes 
cast '*? is a very respectable figure, but this also means that the 
opponents together still have eighty per cent of the vote. And with 
our party seeing in this connection that its vote has doubled in the 
past three years, and that it can expect an even greater increase by 
the time of the next elections, then it would be mad to attempt a 
putsch '” today with twenty against eighty and the army on top of 
that; the certain result would be—the loss of all the positions of 
power won in the past twenty-five years. 

The party has a much better and well-tested means at its 
disposal. On the day our rights under common law are disputed, 
the Sozialdemokrat will reappear. The old machinery, held in 
reserve for this case, will start up again, improved, enlarged, newly 
oiled. And one thing is certain: on a second run the German 
Empire will not hold out for twelve years. 

Frederick Engels 

No. 39, September 27, 1890