At the final sitting of the German Socialist Congress, held
on Wednesday at Berlin, the new Labour programme was adopted. Several of its features, such as the demand for uni- versal female suffrage, and for the direct election of all officials and Judges, are to be strongly condemned ; but the greater part of the programme is merely a statement of the law of England. For example, the demands that "the decision of war or peace shall rest with the elected representatives of the people ;" that "all laws prohibiting or restricting free expres- sion of opinion, the right of association, and the right of public meeting," shall be repealed ; and that there shall be free education, free medical assistance for the poor, free medicine, "'the obligation of self-assessment" for income-tax, the fixing of a sliding-scale for succession-duty according to amount and degree of relationship, Free-trade, and an un- broken thirty-six hours of rest in each week for the working man, are in practice all conceded in England. Many of the reforms demanded which do not exist in England might either be adopted with advantage—as, for instance, the Referendum —or else, like the abolition of the connection between Church and State, are questions well within the range of sane and reasonable politics. That this programme should be regarded as extreme, affords a curious proof of the saying that a German Radical is politically on about the same plane as a somewhat old-fashioned English Tory.
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