6 
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
CHAPTER II. 
THE forerunners—FICHTE AND MARLO. 
S ocialism, as a political party, is of very recent origin in 
Germany. It dates only from 1863, when Lassalle 
excited and organized the labourers’ agitation. The profound 
socialist movement which stirred the labouring classes in France, 
during the last years of Louis-Philippe’s reign, and particularly 
after 1848, had raised but a feeble echo beyond the Rhine. 
No German state, except Baden, was at all prepared to com 
prehend it. The institutions of the old régime had in part 
disappeared, but its spirit and influence were still dominant. 
The artisans were maintained and kept in check by the trade 
guilds. The great factory system was still in its infancy, while 
the rural labourers were as much under the influence of the 
nobles as the serfs from whom they had sprung. The modern 
proletarian was almost unknown. The lower classes had no 
idea that one day they might obtain the suffrage and play a 
part in politics. Never imagining that their fate could be 
other than what it was, they resigned themselves to it as in the 
Middle Ages. 
The French working men were full of the memories of the 
French Revolution. Their fathers had been masters of 
the State, why should not they become so? They were the 
sovereign people—the only true and real sovereign—why live 
in misery? The life of the German working man was far 
harder, but was not that his allotted destiny ? He remembered 
neither the equality of condition, based on collective property, 
of primitive Germany, nor the peasant revolt of the sixteenth 
century, so soon drowned in blood. He still felt the leaden