OBITUARY

Otago Witness, Issue 3101, 20 August 1913, Page 27

OBITUARY

MR THOMAS CURRAN. LONDON, August 13. The death is announced of Mr Thomas Curran, ex-M.P. fpr Sligo. [Mr Curran was a retired Australian merchant. He was a member of the I none School Board of New South W ales (Bombala district) in 1873, and he acted as New South Wales Commissioner to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in I£B6 and the Melbourne Exhibition in 1888. /He represented Sligo South in the House of Commons from 1892 till 1900, and was a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union for Arbitration.]

HERR REBEL

BERLIN, August 13.

Herr Ferdinand August Bebel, the famous German Socialist author and leader, died in prison in Switzerland from paralysis of the heart, in his 74th year. Herr Bebel was staying at Passug with hie married daughter. He died painlessly during the night, and his death was not discovered till the room was entered in the morning. The body will be cremated at Zurich.

August 16. Herr Rebel's fortune amounts to

£30,000. A large portion of it goes to the parliamentary funds.

In the person of August Bebel disappears the doyen of German, and, indeed, of European, Socialism. Unlike Marx, Lasealle, and Liebknecht, ho was of workingclass origin; the most remarkable leader, perhaps, whom the working classes of modern Europe have thrown up out of their own ranks. He was born at Cologne in 1840 (his fa tiler being a non-commissioned officer stationed there), and on leaving the efementary schools was apprenticed to a woodturner in Saxony. He worked for some years in Leipzig as a journeyman at his trade, and in 1864 became a master; but already he had found his real vocation, politics, which finally absorbed him altogether. Ho was first heard of at Leipzig in connection with an Arbeiterbiidungsverein, of which he became president in 1865. The town was at that time the centre of working-class agitation in Germany. It was a Leipzig committee which evoked Lassallc’s epoch-making “ Offences Autwortschreiben ” in 1863; and at Leipzig Lasealle founded in the same year bus German Workers’ Union. In 1886 Lasaallo’s fiery spirit passed abruptly into the night; but all Germany had “ felt him like the thunders roll.” Young Bebel was never a Lasaallcan. His Arbeiterbildungsvercin was an educational and mutual-improvement body, which rather deprecated heat in politics. Not long after Lassalle’s death ho met Ibo man who made him a Socialist. This was Wilhelm Liebknecht, himself the disciple of Karl Marx. Liebknecht and Bebel together get themselves to found a new Socialist party in Germany, which should be a bona fide working-class party on the_ one hand, and in touch with the chief living theorist of Socialism, Karl Marx, on the other. For thus they had to go outside the Lassallean party. The nc-w organisation was launched at Eisenach, in Saxony, in 1869. Largely through the personal labours of Bebel and Liebknecht, it grew very fast; six years later at Gotha the relics of the tassalleans capitulated to it on friendly terms, and the present German Social Democratic party was founded, with Marx {living in London) as its prophet. Liebknecht as its commandcr-in-chief, and Bebel as Liebknccht’s lieutenant. Marx died in 1383, and on Licbknecht’s death in 1900 Rebel became loader of the party. To illustrate the progress made up to that time by the party, wo may mention that in 1877, at the first election after the Ootha consolidation, it polled 493,300 votes, and in 1893 it polled 1,786,(33. Li

1903, after three, years of Rebel’s solo

i leadership, it polled 3,008,000 votes, j Rebel’s activity did not pass unnoticed lor unopposed. In. 1872 ho and Liebknecht I were sentenced to two years’ imprison-

j ment in a fortress for high treason, and nine months’ imprisonment for defaming the Emperor. Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law (passed in 1878) practically expelled him from Leipzig, and ' in 1886 he was sentenced, with a number of other Socialist leaders, to nine months’ imprisonment for secret conspiracy. These I courses, however, failed to nip the growth i of his party, and in 1890 the Anti-Socialist Law was repealed. A milder atmosphere enabled the party to soften some of its asperities, and proclaim itself more frankly constitutional in its methods, and Bebel on the whole promoted this ten- ! dency. A long parliamentary life (he first sat in the North German Parliament

in 1867, and was always returned to the Reichstag from 1871 onwards) had made him a thorough parliamentarian; and the party programme adopted at Erfurt in 1891 "brought out clearly his opposition to the Anarchists. Bohol represented the progressive and reasonable wing of his movement. It was only some years after the complete victory of this wing in 1891

and the final purging away then of the last vestiges of Anarchism, , that there arose a now wing, the Revisionists, as against whom B?bel figured as a conscrver of the revolutionary tradition. Bebel wrote copiously, and at one time did fnuch of the editing of hie party’s paper Vorwarts. Hie most widely read, and perhaps his most interesting, special treatise, is “ Die Frau und dcr Socialismus,” which has been translated into most civilised language ; it ie an examination of the effects, which the economic position of women has on their lives, and an attempt to forecast their development in a Socialist State. But ho was a much greater speaker than writer. Addressing mass-meetings of his supporters, ho could fling out just those infectious battle-cries which fire men to the very uttermost. He acquired a breadth and depth of general culture remarkable in any workman, and rare indeed in one so busy a£ a Labour loader.