Such a situation seemed even to the extremest internationalists to have arisen. At the memorable meeting in the White Hall of the royal palace in Berlin on August 4, 1914, the Socialist members of the Reichstag were present and joined the members of the _bourgeois_ parties in swearing to support the Fatherland. The Kaiser retracted his reference to _vaterlandslose Gesellen_. "I no longer know any parties," he said. "I know only Germans." Hugo Haase, one of the Socialist leaders and one of the small group of men whose efforts later brought about the German revolution and the downfall of the empire and dynasty, was carried away like his colleagues by the enthusiasm of the moment. He promised in advance the support of his party to the empire's war measures, and when, a few hours later, the first war-appropriation measure, carrying five billion marks, was laid before the deputies, the Socialists voted for it without a dissenting voice, and later joined for the first time in their history in the _Kaiserhoch_, the expression of loyalty to monarch and country with which sessions of the Reichstag were always closed.
Nothing could testify more strongly to the universal belief that Germany was called upon to fight a defensive and just war. For not only had the Socialist teachings, as we have seen, denounced all warfare as in the interests of capital alone, but their party in the Reichstag included one man whose anti-war convictions had already resulted in his being punished for their expression. This was Dr. Karl Liebknecht, who had been tried at the Supreme Court in Leipsic in 1907 on a charge of high treason for publishing an anti-military pamphlet, convicted of a lesser degree of treason and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment. Haase himself had bitterly attacked militarism and war in a speech in the Reichstag in April, 1913, in opposition to the government's military bills, and only his parliamentary immunity protected him from sharing Liebknecht's fate. One of the strongest defenders of the war in Bavaria was Kurt Eisner, already an intellectual Bolshevist and Communist, who had been compelled earlier to leave the editorial staff of the _Vorwärts_ because of his far-going radicalism and dreamy impracticality.