The Government's advisers in politics and in the Press, finding that so far from bringing over the Independents to the Government the Congress was fast drawing the Majority into opposition, strongly recommended the Government to close the Congress on the ground that it was only wasting time in futile and inflammatory agitation. The Independents countered this by forcing an immediate issue on the main question--the constitutional recognition of the Council system.
The opening of the discussion showed that a majority of the Congress favoured a combination of Parliament and Councils in which the latter should have political as well as economic functions. Whether the Majoritarian leaders in the Congress were genuinely convinced of the necessity of giving the Council system recognition or whether they were forced to compromise in order to retain command of their followers, and through them control their following among the workmen, I do not know. Anyway, after a series of speeches, in which the Majoritarian leaders, Kalinsky and Cohn-Reuss, vied in concessions, a compromise was put forward that represented practically the position held by their opponents the Independents a few weeks before. The compromise between the Parliamentary system and Council system they proposed was probably workable; though arrived at from an unsound position--that of regarding the Central Council as a controlling authority over the National Assembly; whereas it would really be supplying the driving power and the Assembly the brake.
Now, although the Independents, for the same tactical reasons that had driven the Majoritarians to the Left, were now proclaiming the principle of "all power to the Councils" (which had been until then the position of the absent Communists) they were rather embarrassed at finding themselves "Bolshevists," explicitly demanding the dictatorship of the proletariat. The spring running of German politics to the Left had been so headlong that the parliamentarian leaders of the Left had had to sprint hard to keep ahead of their followers. But if they had kept one eye anxiously gauging the pace of the avalanche surging at their heels they had kept the other guessing no less anxiously at the position of the abyss of "Bolshevism" ahead. And small wonder if they were a little bewildered and out of breath. For as late as December they had been still accepting the Assembly as the sole executant of the revolution, and looking on the Councils as practically extinct and politically eccentric. By January they had been forced to accept the Councils as a fact that had to be fitted in somehow. In February their periodicals were full of schemes for giving economic powers to the Councils, while reserving all political power, national and provincial, to the Assemblies. By March they had recognised that they must have political power as well and by April they had reached the compromise of a bi-cameral constitution now adopted by their conservative opponents, the Majoritarians. And now, in order to clear the leftward road for the Majoritarians and keep pace with the Communists, old parliamentary hands, like Haase, Oscar Cohn and Breitscheidt, found themselves condemning their newly born and much beloved parliamentary democracy to be smothered in its cradle for the benefit of a Bolshevist changeling. No wonder they were ready to join forces with their Socialist comrades of the majority in a compromise which found a place for their firstborn the Weimar Parliament and for their familiar world of party politics.