It was in 1890 that the final breach with his own class took
place. He was then the chief editor of the democratic Berliner
Volkszeitung and in its columns he resolutely opposed Bismarck's
policy and defended the social democrats, who were still being
persecuted under the Anti-Socialist Law. His attacks on
Bismarck were extremely effective, and the latter answered with
a threat of suppression unless the shareholders dismissed the
uncomfortable critic. True to those traditions of pusillanimity
which caused both Marx and Engels to despair of the German
bourgeoisie the shareholders swallowed their democratic prin-
ciples to defend their economic interests, and Franz Mehring was
sacrificed. At the age of 44 he now took the final and logical
step and joined the Social Democratic Party.

The period of his greatest literary activity then opened up.
The Neue Zeit, at that time under the editorship of Karl Kautsky,
published many brilliant articles from his pen, including the
famous series which appeared in book form in 1893 as The
Lessing Legend, the classic Prussian history of the Frederician age,
and caused Friedrich Engels to write to Kautsky from London
declaring that the articles made him look forward with impatience
to every new number of the publication. Throughout the years
which followed up to the time of his death Mehring's pen produced
innumerable articles on philosophic, historical, military, literary
and political subjects, and won him a foremost position in the in-
ternational socialist movement. The chief scene of his activities
was the writing-desk, but for all that he was no arm-chair strategist,
but a fighter all the time with the sharpest weapons at his disposal,
and he used them with all his energy against a powerful enemy.

From the closing years of the last century onwards when the
revisionist efforts of Bernstein and his friends undermined revo-
lutionary Marxism in the social-democratic organization and
provided the yearnings of its leaders for respectability with a
theoretical cloak, Mehring was in the front ranks of those who
fought strenuously against a policy which led logically to the
collapse of the German working-class movement in 1914.
Throughout the war years he remained true to the principles of
socialist internationalism and despite his advanced years he spent
many months in prison. Together with Clara Zetkin and Rosa
Luxemburg, "the only real men in the social-democratic move-
ment " as he was fond of calling them, he raised aloft the banner
of proletarian internationalism in the heroic Spartakist League.
He lived to see the first post-war class struggles and the defeat of
the revolutionary workers, and he died in January 1919 shortly
before his seventy-third birthday, his death undoubtedly being
hastened by the terrible tidings which reached him a day or

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