FROM SADDLE-MAKER TO AUTOCRAT

Fritz EbErt, harness- maker, Heidelberger by birth, 47 years old, has succeeded William von Hohenzollern as Autocrat of Germany. if a republic emerges, it seems likely that he will be its first President.

there is nothing in Ebert’s career to justify the assumption that a red Flag Chancellorship has brought an anti- militarist to power. Ebert supported the war from its outset.

in December 1915, when 20 anti-war members of the Socialist group in the reichstag seceded from the party organisation, it was Ebert who publicly rebuked them. He declared that it was the sacred duty of the united German nation to support the government’s ‘war of self-defence’.

Ebert is the son of a master tailor. He began life as a saddler’s apprentice, identified himself in his teenage years with the Working Youths’ Association (German Socialism’s great training school) and at 21 was editor of the burger-zeitung, the Socialist organ at bremen.

After two years’ service as a trade union secretary, he was appointed to the Executive Committee of the Socialist national organisation, elected to the reichstag in 1912, and in 1913 became party chairman.

Short and sturdy, Ebert is a man of forceful temperament. A swarthy complexion gives him the aspect of an italian or Spaniard, an impression heightened by a mass of thick, blackish hair and thick moustache.

German Social Democracy has fiendish satisfaction in dethroning William ii. it has been his sworn enemy ever since, in 1902, the former Kaiser denounced Social Democrats as ‘wretches without a country’.