The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH AND INCORPOTATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. TUESDAY, MAY 22, 1928. THE GERMAN ELECTIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH AND INCORPOTATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

TUESDAY, MAY 22, 1928. THE GERMAN ELECTIONS.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

At the time of writing 1 the results of the German elections are unofficial, but there id no doubt that the relatively conservative or reactionary sections of the Reichstag—the Nationalists and the Centre Party in particular—have lost heavily. On the other hand, the Socialists and Communists have made great gains, and the Socialists \ ill be by far the strongest party in the House.

This virtual triumph of the Socialists is, after all, a very natural outcome of recent developments in Germany. Before the war Social Democracy—the teaching of Marx and his followers in various forms—was making rapid headway throughout the Empire, and in process of time its progress would inevitably have converted the autocracy into a constitutional government. But when war came the Socialists, with the exception of a small minority, sacrificed their principles on patriotic grounds, and supported the Kaiser and his counsellors in their policy of militaristic aggression. For the time being German Socialism was regarded as having committed suicide, and it became for the moment politically a dead letter. But when the republic was once firmly established the democratic tendencies of the age manifested themselves again, and the Social Democrats have now once more attained the numbers and the strength of which they boasted before 1914.

No doubt this post-war growth of Social Democracy in Germany has bw aided by the absurd pretensions of the reactionaries and the dangerous plots that they have engineered against the republic. The German people are sincerely patriotic, as they proved during the war. But they have had too bitter an experience of absolutism and militarism to desire a restoration of the "old order," and the strength that the Socialists have now revealed at the polls may be taken as positive proof that the Monarchists and the militarists have lost ground irretrievably. We may explain the rapid growth of the Communist Party in the same way. For the follies and excesses of the Nationalists and other conservatives have so far disgusted a large section of the people that they have lost faith even in Socialism, and look to a "catastrophic" revolution as the only effective means of redressing their grievances and securing their rights. But the Germans are too docile and too well disciplined to incline naturally toward a policy of violence and destruction, and the Socialists, so long as they maintain their ascendancy, can be trusted to control the situation on strictly constitutional lines.