The Knell of Socialism.

Huntly Press and District Gazette, Volume 4, 17 December 1915, Page 3

The Knell of Socialism.

Solicialism before the war, was one of the things which was to make war impossible, says a London paper. The German Socialists, so often held up to our eyes as the growing force which was to destroy militarism, quickly showed that all such visions were delusions ; and every day confirms the belief that German Socialism, so far from being a menace to the Prussian military caste, has been used by them as a weapon. The Grand Duke of H esse at the recent opening of theDietfhobnobbedwith the leader of the Socialists, who was fomerly his most bitter critic, and he was reported to have listened with politeness to the Socialist leader’s suggestion that the war was perhaps an excellent thing because of the intermingling all classes which was a necessary accompaniment of it. That is very cold comfort to French Socialists, who had once hoped that with their Germnan colleagues they might arrive at a spmpathetic understand about Alsace-Lorraine. It is colder comfort still for the Belgian Socialists, who have seen their country ravaged, their women and children killed by German Socialists, whose patriotic obligations have made them one with the German army of invasion. It may, we hope, be a lesson to our own Socialists, though some of these assembled under the banners of fatuous pacifist societies are slow to learn that German Socialism, like German kultur, only exists in order to impose itself on the liberties of other nations and other peoples. It is, like German militarism, based on tyranny. Many baneful things will be extinguished by the war, not least of them the credulity which believed that Socialism could regenerate the world.