[8] Called "the elder Liebknecht" to distinguish him from his son Karl Liebknecht, who was killed while under arrest in Berlin in the winter of 1919.
Socialism first showed itself as a political factor in Germany in 1867, when five Socialists were elected to the North German Diet. Two _Genossen_[9] were sent to the first Reichstag in 1871, with a popular vote of 120,000, and six years later nearly a half million red votes were polled and twelve Socialists took their seats in the Reichstag. The voting-strength of the party in Berlin alone increased from 6,700 in 1871 to 57,500 in 1877, or almost ninefold.
[9] _Genosse_, comrade, is the term by which all German-speaking Socialists address each other.
A propaganda of tremendous extent and extreme ability was carried on. No _bourgeois_ German politician except Bismarck ever had such a keen appreciation of the power of the printed word as did those responsible for Socialism's missionary work. Daily newspapers, weekly periodicals and monthly magazines were established, and German Socialism was soon in possession of the most extensive and best conducted Socialist press in the world. The result was two-fold: the press contributed mightily to the spreading of its party's doctrines and at the same time furnished a school in which were educated the majority of the party leaders. Probably three quarters of the men who afterward became prominent in the party owed their rise and, to a great extent, their general education to their service on the editorial staffs of their party's press. By intelligent reports and special Articles on news of interest to all members of the _Internationale_, whether German, French, English, or of what nationality they might be, this press made itself indispensable to the leaders of that movement all over the world, and contributed greatly to influencing the ideas of the Socialists of other lands.
Bismarck's clear political vision saw the menace in a movement which openly aimed at the establishment of a German republic and at the eventual overthrow of all _bourgeois_ governments and the elimination of local patriotism and state lines. In 1878 he secured from the Reichstag the enactment of the famous _Ausnahmegesetze_ or special laws, directed against the Socialists. They forbade Socialist publications and literature in general, prohibited the holding of Socialist meetings or the making of speeches by adherents of the party. Even the circulation of Socialist literature was prohibited. The _Ausnahmegesetze_ legalized as an imperial measure the treatment that had already been meted out to Socialists in various states of the Empire. Following the Gotha congress in 1875, fifty-one delegates to the congress were sent to prison. Wilhelm Liebknecht received a sentence of three years and eight months and Bebel of two years and eleven months. In Saxony, from 1870 to 1875, fifty Socialists underwent prison sentences aggregating more than forty years.