GERMAN ELECTIONS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 9, 11 January 1912, Page 7

GERMAN ELECTIONS.

SOCIALISTS MAKING DETERMINED EFFORT. ¦j telegraph.— '«¦•«• AiMclaUm.->Cwrlgh% BERLIN, 10th January. The present elections have brought 1423 candidates for 397 seats." The Socialists contest every seat. Writing come time ago in Die Zukunft, Herr Maximilian Harden, the wellknown political writer, gaVe utterance to extremely pessimistic views on the probable result of the general election, which he, like all other competent judges of the situation, anticipates will bring about an extraordinary and alarming growth of the Socialist party. Herr Harden writes :—: — "We ore at the beginning of a revolution. Most people cannot realise ib yet, although the unmistakable signs of the times ought to warn them of its approach; Dut tho majority ha* never noticed the beginning of a revolution. What history names revolution was almost always the last and most violent phase of the revolutionary movement which had been silently and gradually growing for a long time previous to tho 'actual outbreak. The German, people feel that their Government institutions no longer satisfy their political needs, and that many class privileges, almost all the exceptional rights possessed by the members' of the Civil Service, and the whole administration of the country have become intolerable, and their modest wishes having remained unfulfilled too long, they now desir* to rush into the other extreme of complete democracy." Herr Harden then elaborates the varous phases of the danger which he sketches in outline in the above sentences, and argues that the only way to combat Socialism, is tc- pursue a policy of sane and moderate reform. An undiluted reactionary policy, he points out, merely assists the Socialists in their propaganda, whereas a progressive policy would tend to disarm them, and to deprive them of the support of large numbers of electors who now vote for Socialist candidates solely for the purpose of demonstrating their discontent with the existing condition of (Mngs.