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  comprehend ­
  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