championed a cause only when it seemed possible that he would be successful in it. Before World War I he was a regular speaker on budgetary and army issues and regarded as a representative of the party's center. When he directed sharp attacks against the imperial Hohenzollern family in the Reichstag in 1912, Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and the members of the Bundesrat who were present left the hall in protest. On several occasions Scheidemann represented German social democracy at congresses abroad. Publicity trips took him to France, Switzerland, and the United States. A speech given by Scheidemann in Paris in 1912 caused a great public stir and was published in Germany in a distorted form to defame him specifically and the Social Democrats in general as "traitors to the fatherland". In a Reichstag debate on 3 December1912, Scheidemann's party colleague Eduard David felt compelled to reproduce the true wording of Scheidemann's disputed statements:"Against those who try to push us down into the bestiality of a European war, we will defend ourselves with the courage of despair. The German workers and socialists also respect and love the French proletarians and socialists like brothers. ... Our enemy is ... in another place. It is where yours also is. That is capitalism. Let us wage the struggle together, comrades, for the progress of humanity, for the freedom of labor, for world peace." World War I During World War I Scheidemann represented a middle line between the right and left wings of the SPD. In principle he supported the approval of war credits, but he opposed a victorious peace and advocated a negotiated peace without annexations. His statement "What is French shall remain French, what is Belgian shall remain Belgian, what is German shall remain German" was called high treason in militarist-nationalist circles. Representatives of the German Fatherland Party in particular declared that they wanted to "hang" Scheidemann. In January 1915 Scheidemann expressed his anger at elements in the SPD who could not bear to hear the word "fatherland". His statement was preceded by Karl Liebknecht's breach of party discipline when in December 1914 he voted against a war loan bill. Hugo Haase defended Liebknecht at the time, and he received numerous expressions of sympathy from within the SPD. The idea of a negotiated peace ("Scheidemann Plan"), however, could no longer prevent a split within the SPD on the issue of