It would not be surprising, on the contrary, quite understandable, if the horrible events in Paris would lead to a general persecution of demagogues in Germany and Italy. Because to the imagination, not only of the ruling class but of all property owners, the Communists today are just such bogies as the virtuous "Burschenschafter" and the less tame Carbonari were once in Germany and Italy. It is to this generation hardly possible any more to think itself back into the state of mind deliberately nursed by the governments among the "decent citizens" half a century, nay, thirty years, ago by systematic misrepresentation of the activity of the "demagogues." Today the most dreaded demagogues and Carbonaris of them, are celebrated statesmen, professors, privy counsellors, famous writers, etc., enthusiastically cheered whenever they appear at some celebration to tell their amazed listeners of the deprivations and persecutions they had to suffer for working in their own way half a century earlier, for what since, in a different way, has become reality.

How now, if in another fifty years something similar should happen? How, if in the year 1920, the political, or better, the social ideas (for which in 1871, fifty-thousand or more Communists shed their blood) should in purified form come into their own? Today the mere supposition of such a thing being possible appears utterly fantastic - however, hardly more fantastic than 2the prediction would have appeared fifty years ago, that the nephew of Napoleon would ride over France for two decades, and that the then twenty-five years old second son of the King of Prussia would become Europe's most powerful emperor. It is true German unification as the year 1871, brought it, is very different from what the "Burschenschafter" dreamed it; not a romantic, poetic dream of Hohenstaufen, but the sober, realistic rule of the Hohenzollerns. And so the Socialist idea, too, which appeared in Paris in 1871, in its crudest form, reminiscent of Caliban, by 1920, would appear in a far more decent, thoroughly un-democratic shape. But with this qualification, the gradual growing up of the Socialist ideas to a power transforming the prevailing conditions in Europe is not at all impossible. It would not be surprising at all, if at the end of the 19th century the slogan "Equalification of social differences, elimination of the conflict between capital and labor" would have as much power over the minds of men, as at the middle of the century the cry "Popular representation, freedom of press and speech, national unity," had.

So much is certain, that in the thickly populated nations of Europe, ideas are germinating (as yet in the most formless shape) that finds no expression in the present political organizations, and that these ideas will provide the motive power for the transformations that are to be expected in the next generations. But to distinguish already, now, between the chaff and the wheat; 3between the dross and the metal; that would require a gift of prophecy which we do not claim to possess.