“We would have been arrested,” one of the Social-Democratic deputies who voted for the war credits on August is alleged to have declared at a workers’ meeting in Berlin. The workers shouted in reply: “Well, what would have been bad about that?”

If there was no other signal that would instil in the German and the French working masses revolutionary sentiments and the need to prepare for revolutionary action, the arrest of a member of parliament for a courageous speech would have been useful as a call for unity of the proletarians of the various countries in their revolutionary work. It is not easy to bring about such unity; all the more was it the duty of members of parliament, whose high office made their purview of the entire political scene so extensive, to take the initiative.

— The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Ilich Lenin