industrial and commercial State in Europe; and she covets the
first.

This rapid material development had its obverse. The system of mutual
exclusion, that existed between the German States up to the
establishment of German unity, had until then furnished a living to an
uncommonly numerous class of artisans and small peasants. With the
precipitous tearing down of all the protective barriers, these people
suddenly found themselves face to face with an unbridled process of
capitalist production and development. At first, the prosperity epoch of
the early seventies caused the danger to seem slighter, but it raged all
the more fearful when the crisis set in. The bourgeoisie had used the
prosperity period to make marvelous progress, and thus now caused the
distress to be felt ten-fold. From now on the chasm between the
property-holding and the propertyless classes widened rapidly. This
process of decomposition and of absorption, which--promoted by the
growth of material power on the one hand, and the declining power of
resistance on the other--proceeds with ever increasing rapidity, throws
whole classes of the population into ever more straitened circumstances.
They find themselves from day to day more powerfully threatened in their
position and their condition of life; and they see themselves doomed
with mathematical certainty.

In this desperate struggle many seek possible safety in a change of
profession. The old men can no longer make the change: only in the
rarest instances are they able to bequeath an independence to their
children: the last efforts are made, the last means applied towards
placing sons and daughters in positions with fixed salaries, which
require no capital to carry on. These are mainly the civil service
offices in the Empire, States or municipalities--teacherships, the Post
Office and railroad positions, and also the higher places in the service
of the bourgeoisie in the counting rooms, stores and factories as
managers, chemists, technical overseers, engineers, constructors, etc.;
finally the so-called liberal professions: law, medicine, theology,
journalism, art, architecture and lastly pedagogy.

Thousands upon thousands, who had previously taken up a trade, now--the
possibility of independence and of a tolerable livelihood having
vanished--seek for any position in the said offices. The pressure is
towards higher education and learning. High schools, gymnasiums,
polytechnics, etc., spring up like